Cityscapes

José Parlá’s first book, published for Cityscapes, his Miami solo debut, staged by Spoonfed during Art Basel Miami Beach in December 2006.

Some 150 pages of paintings and photographs follow Parlá’s calligraphic, layered surfaces back to the walls that inform them: weathered posters, scrawled tags and the palimpsest of the street, recorded in his own photographs and reworked in paint. An introduction by the exhibition’s curator Manon Slome and an essay by the theorist Michael Betancourt place the work between graffiti, abstraction and urban archaeology. Designed by Chris Rubino with the artist; cover photograph by Stefan Ruiz.

Parlá (b. 1973, Miami) grew up writing graffiti in Miami and Puerto Rico and has since produced large-scale public commissions, including murals for One World Trade Center and the Barclays Center. Cityscapes precedes the Hatje Cantz survey Walls, Diaries, and Paintings, also in the collection.