Through his abstract paintings, the Miami-born, Brooklyn-based artist José Parlá explores themes ranging from memory, gesture, and layering, to movement, dance, and hip-hop culture, to codes, mapping, and mark-making. Coming up in Miami in the late 1980s and early '90s, Parlá spent his adolescence and early adult years steeped in hip-hop culture and an underground scene that involved break dancing, writing rhymes, and making aerosol art. Parlá resists calling this art form "graffiti" or "street art," considering those terms as lazy journalese and pejorative. "What we do is way deeper than just scratching the surface," he says. "We developed, as young people, an entire language that was based on a very complicated mechanical lettering style, a code that only a certain few groups of people could understand." The art form still manifests, in wholly original ways, in his abstract works, which, while decidedly of the 21st century, extend in meaning and method back to ancient wall writings and cave drawings.
The past two years of Parlá's life may have been his most pivotal yet. In early 2021, he contracted a severe case of Covid-19 that required him to be hospitalized, intubated, and put into a medically induced coma for three months, during which he suffered a stroke and brain bleeding. His doctors didn't expect him to survive. Slowly but surely, though, Parlá pushed through. Today he says that artmaking was essential to his return to health, because it both helped him recover much of his memory and gave him hope for his future. He just celebrated his 50th birthday last month.
On the episode, Parlá talks about the aftermath of this near-death experience; his ongoing activism with the collective Wide Awakes; and how his large-scale murals at locations including the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Barclays Center, and One World Trade Center trace back to his early days of painting elaborate wall works with aerosol in Miami and Atlanta.
