José Parlá Libros

Based on an exhibition at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Segmented Realities compiles a group of five paintings and ten sculptural paintings by Cuban-American painter José Parlá (born 1973). Each of the works suggest fragments salvaged from urban sites that have experienced social upheaval and transformation; like his segments of walls in Havana, New York, London or the Berlin Wall, Parlá's sculptures bear witness to the waves of history inscribed on their surfaces, told in the poetic language of the city--surfaces bearing layers of marks on which ensuing generations might imagine their own manifestos and declarations of selfhood. With an essay by curator Michael Rooks, this hardcover is a gorgeous documentation of Parlá's latest project. Parlá is also known for recently completing a commissioned 90-foot mural for the lobby of One World Trade Center in New York City, a mural at the Barclays Center and also at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Since 2004, the French artist JR has traveled the world flyposting colossal black and white portraits of ordinary citizens on the walls of city buildings. His most recent project, The Wrinkles of the City, where he photographed the city̕̕s oldest inhabitants, imagining their wrinkles as metaphors of urban texture and history. In May 2012, JR collaborates with American artist José Parlá on the latest iteration of The Wrinkles of the City: a huge mural installation in Havana, undertaken for the Havana Biennale, for which JR and Parlá photographed and recorded 25 senior citizens who had lived through the Cuban revolution, creating portraits which Parlá, who is of Cuban descent, interlaced with palimpsestic calligraphic writings and paintings. Parlá's markings echo the distressed surfaces of the walls he inscribes, and offer commentary on the lives of Cuba's elders; together, JR and Parlá's murals marvelously animate a city whose walls are otherwise adorned only by images of its leaders. This volume features the portraits, short biographies of their subjects and photographs of their mural collaborations painted around Havana.