José Parlá has emerged in the past decade as one of his generation’s most fervent champions of painting, working for more than twenty years to establish a style of that transforms the language of the street into a hybrid form of abstraction and urban realism. From the outset, Parlá has sought to interpret his experience of cities that have served as crossroads in his life, from Miami to Brooklyn, San Juan to Havana, Tokyo to Hong Kong, and internationally as a central theme in his work, while purposefully engaging with the rich history of painting since the rise of abstraction in the 1950s. His work provides markers of time, and is about the accumulation of information that settles like accretions upon the surfaces of walls and streets, and in the lines on the hands and faces of the people who inhabit them.

~Michael Rooks, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at High Museum of Art Atlanta, Georgia

Parlá (born 1973) studied at Miami Dade Community College, New World School of the Arts and Savannah College of Art & Design. Solo institutional exhibitions of Parla’s work have been organized at The Bronx Museum of the Arts, New
York City, Istanbul74’ a project of the Istanbul Biennial (2019); HOCA Foundation, Hong Kong (2019); Neuberger Museum of Art, NY, NY (2018); SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA (2017); National YoungArts Foundation, Miami, FL (2016); The High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA (2015

María Magdalena Campos-Pons combines and crosses diverse artistic practices, including photography, painting, sculpture, film, video, and performance. Her work addresses issues of history, memory, gender, and religion; it investigates how each one of these themes informs identity formation.

Born in 1959 in La Vega, a town in the province of Matanzas, Cuba, Campos-Pons is a descendant of Nigerians who had been brought to the island as slaves in the 19th century. She grew up learning firsthand about the legacy of slavery along with the beliefs of Santeria, a Yoruba-derived religion. Directly informed by the traditions, rituals, and practices of her ancestors, her work is deeply autobiographical. Often using herself and her Afro-Cuban relatives as subjects, she creates historical narratives that illuminate the spirit of people and places, past and present, and renders universal relevance from personal history and persona. Her imagery and performances recall dark narratives of the Middle Passage and the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. They honor the labor of black bodies on indigo and sugar plantations, renew Catholic and Santeria religious practices, and celebrate revolutionary uprisings in the Americas. As she writes, “I…collect and tell stories of forgotten people in order to foster a dialogue to better understand and propose a poetic, compassionate reading of our time.”

Teresita Fernández (b. Miami, 1968; lives in Brooklyn, NY) creates work that is characterized by self-reflection and conceptual wayfinding. Her immersive, monumental works are inspired by a radical rethinking of landscape informed by diverse historical and cultural references. Often using images from the natural world, Fernández’s work emphasizes what she refers to as stacked landscapes, or the overlapping and often omitted connections between places and people. Transforming materials such as charcoal, gold, graphite, and iron-ore, she is interested in revealing loaded ties to colonization and the inherent history of violence that is embedded in the landscape. Her practice engages in a subtle unraveling of land, power, visibility, and erasure.

Fernández is a 2005 MacArthur Foundation Fellow and the recipient of numerous awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Artist’s Grant, and a Louis Comfort Tiffany Biennial Award. Appointed by President Obama, she is the first Latina to serve on the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, a 100-year-old federal panel that advises the President and Congress on national matters of design and aesthetics. Fernández’s works have been exhibited both nationally and internationally at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Smithsonian Museum of American Art; MASS MoCA; and Castello di Rivoli, Turin, among others. Her mid-career retrospective, Elemental, was recently on view at the Pérez Art Museum, Miami (2019) and Phoenix Art Museum (2020).

Her work is included in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Pérez Art Museum Miami; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston;. She has created public art commissions for the Brooklyn Academy of Music, (2021); the New Orleans Museum of Art (2019); the Ford Foundation (2019); and Madison Square Park (2015). She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.