On view this winter at the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) is the artist José Parlá’s latest exhibition, aptly titled “Homecoming.” A lush mosaic of new and revelatory works, the show rejoices in Parlá’s meaningful return to painting and to his hometown, delving deeply into the ways in which the Magic City has colored his life and artistry.
Reverently invoking his family’s Cuban heritage, and shared time growing up in Puerto Rico, Parlá infuses artworks made of symbolic, diverse materials with lyrical memories of urban struggle, vitality, and hope. This immersive love letter to the life experiences of immigrant families is marked by works with evocative titles like Return to Miami’s Ancestral Circle (2024), Heritage Trails, Journeys of Hope and Renewal (2024), and Aguanile, The Spiritual Cleansing of Home (2024).
Whitewaller heard from Parlá about offering a space of reflection on the resilience that we all carry within us.
José Parlá. “A Life of Memories Racing Through Art Deco Miami Beach Avenues,” 2024. Acrylic, oil, enamel, collage and plaster on canvas. 96 x 168 x 3 inches. Courtesy the artist and Parlá Studios.
WHITEWALLER: Can you share some of your most visceral memories growing up in the United States and Puerto Rico that led to this kaleidoscopic moment in your practice?
JOSÉ PARLÁ: Growing up in Miami and Puerto Rico, my memories are like fragmented mosaics, filled with vibrant color and texture. Miami in the eighties and nineties was this beautiful contradiction—rich with the culture of the Cuban and Latin American exile and migrant communities but also chaotic and raw with its urban energy. I remember the humidity that made the walls feel alive, the echoes of my parents’ stories of leaving Cuba, and how their nostalgia and resilience permeated our daily lives. In Puerto Rico, I felt closer to nature and something ancestral—a rhythm to the island still lives in my brushstrokes today.
All of this, the sounds, the languages, the street textures, became my first palette. I translate these memories into layers of paint, ink, and collage, attempting to capture the rhythm of displacement and adaptation.
José Parlá. “American Mindscape,” 2024.
Acrylic, oil, enamel spray paint, paper collage, and plaster on canvas. 96 x 168 x 3 inches. Courtesy the artist and Parlá Studios.
“I translate these memories into layers of paint, ink, and collage, attempting to capture the rhythm of displacement and adaptation,”
José Parlá
Creating Immersive Landscapes that Echo Human Experience
WW: How did you conceive of the immersive, collage-like approach displayed in the show, which fuses paint, ink, plaster, and posters as a creative language to invoke personal and universal themes of displacement and adaptation?
JP: The collage-like approach came naturally, as I’ve always seen the world as layered, literally and metaphorically. Displacement is a layered experience—it’s about what you leave behind, what you carry with you, and what you adapt to in new environments. Using various materials—paint, ink, plaster, posters—I can create immersive landscapes reflecting that experience.
Each material represents a different part of my adventures. The plaster represents something permanent, rooted in history, while the posters are temporary, like the moments of adaptation we experience in new places. The layering is a way to fuse the personal with the universal, to create a visual language that speaks to anyone who has ever experienced the feeling of being in between worlds.
José Parlá. “Return to Miami’s Ancestral Circle,” 2024. Acrylic, oil, enamel, collage, and plaster on canvas. 60 x 60 x 2 1/4 inches. Courtesy the artist and Parlá Studios.
“The layering is a way to fuse the personal with the universal, to create a visual language that speaks to anyone who has ever experienced the feeling of being in between worlds,”
José Parlá
Sharing a Sacred Studio with the Community
WW: What was your experience working alongside Pérez Art Museum Miami to develop the concept for the visionary two-part presentation, intermeshing the live creation of a site-specific mural with the reproduction of your intimate studio realm?
JP: Working with PAMM has been an incredibly collaborative and enriching experience. The team at the museum understood the depth of what I wanted to explore with “Homecoming”—the connection between personal history, geography, displacement, and memory. The idea to merge the live creation of a mural with a reproduction of my studio was born out of this desire to show both the process and the final work. I want visitors to feel like they are stepping into my world, witnessing the raw creation of the piece in real time, and then moving into a space that reflects my day-to-day practice.
The studio, for me, is sacred—it’s where the memories and ideas are processed, and it’s a space I want to share with the community.
José Parlá. “Breath of Life, Inhale and Exhale,” 2024. Acrylic, oil, enamel, collage, and plaster on canvas. Two panels: 96 x 72 inches, each. 192 x 3 inches, overall. Courtesy the artist and Parlá Studios.
