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 painting 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, London to Tokyo, Istanbul to Hong Kong 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, like the lines on the hands and faces of the people who inhabit them. Parlá is publicly known for his permanent installations of large-scale paintings. Coby Kennedy, a Pratt Institute undergraduate, Columbia University MFA graduate and 2011 Skowhegan Fellow, Kennedy has exhibited in New York, Los Angeles, Miami, and San Francisco as well as abroad including Japan and Europe. He has received the Civil Society Institute Fellowship, the One World Award – International Quorum of Motion Picture Producers – Zurich Switzerland and the Gold Camera Award – US International Film & Video Festival for his collaborative film work. As a professional industrial conceptual designer, Kennedy’s work has been showcased and reviewed in publications including The New York Times, Italy’s La Repubblica, Hyperallergic and Japan’s Car Styling Magazine. Coby Kennedy lives and works in New York.
