José Parlá (born 1973 in Miami, Florida), is a Brooklyn-based contemporary artist whose work has been described as "lying between the boundary of abstraction and calligraphy." Parlá is publicly known for his permanent installations of large-scale paintings. In 2013 he painted the mural Nature of Language at the James B. Hunt Jr. Library at North Carolina State University, the mural Diary of Brooklyn at the Barclays Center, and a 90-foot mural ONE: Union of the Senses in the lobby of One World Trade Center. Parlá constructs his paintings improvisationally by layering materials, saying "I’m really interested in the way our lives are built up out of memory and history, and how we reflect that in our surroundings." Parlá has exhibited worldwide and collaborated with artists from various countries. In 2012, Jose worked with French artist JR on a piece titled "Wrinkles of the City: Havana", Cuba a project, which in the same year was selected to be in the 11th Havana Biennial. As part of the collaboration, Parlá and JR co-directed a documentary by the same title that was awarded the Grand Prize for Documentary Short and Best U.S. Premiere Documentary Short in 2013. Early life José Parlá was born in Miami to Cuban immigrant parents. At just 10, he began painting art on walls in Miami, often signing his work with his nickname "Ease." Parlá received a scholarship to Savannah College of Art & Design when he was 16, after a high school teacher noticed his talent. He later studied at Miami Dade Community College and New World School of the Arts. He moved to the Bronx after his father died to established himself as an artist in New York, initially supporting himself by designing album covers and T-shirts for hip-hop artists such as Gang Starr. Career Parlá's heavily layered paintings can often resemble distressed city walls. Writer Greg Tate wrote: "What José Parlá's paintings force us to realize, as good historical paintings always do, is that given enough time and entropy even the hurtling locomotive motion of the streets can be arrested, contemplated, symbolically apprehended, studied, replicated. The temptation to call Parlá a 'post-graffiti’ painter is great but I'd prefer we recognize him as a historical landscape painter even though his historical landscape is made of concrete, wood and wallboard and his 'histories' derive from personal memories and from events buried and embedded in the gorgeous erosions and