LAYQA NUNA YAWAR

CV


Portrait by Redens Desrosiers
Portrait by Simbarashe Cha
Portrait by Malaika Muindi

Visual Artist - Muralist - Educator


Biography

Layqa Nuna Yawar (b. 1984, Cuenca, Ecuador) is a multidisciplinary artist based in the unceded lands of the Lenni-Lenape, current-day Newark, New Jersey. His practice explores the intersection of migration, decolonization, and the reclamation of public space. Layqa treats the public square as both a canvas and a sanctuary, with his name itself—a self-constructed reclamation of his Kichwa-Kañari heritage—serving as a blueprint for his mission: to peel back the layers of colonial history and reveal the vibrant, subaltern history underneath.

Layqa is best known for his large-scale public commissions that transform architectural surfaces into monuments for silenced narratives. In 2023, he completed a landmark 350-foot mural for Newark Liberty International Airport’s Terminal A, a work that reimagines the airport as a site of invisible transit and labor. By elevating the portraits of everyday workers and migrants to a heroic scale, he challenges the traditional semiotics of power and the whitewashing of history.

His work has been exhibited and commissioned internationally, spanning projects in the Americas, Asia, and Europe. Recent institutional highlights include commissions for MoMA PS1, Public Art Fund, the United Nations’ World Food Program, and a residency with Monument Lab. Awards include a Moving Walls Fellowship from the Open Society Foundations, an Artistic Impact Award from the Newark Museum of Contemporary Art, and an Art Change Maker Award from the Visual Art Center of New Jersey. Layqa’s practice bridges the gap between the institution and the street, cementing his role as a vital voice in the global decolonization movement.

Artist Statement 

I am a contemporary image maker taking up the pictorial traditions of my indigenous, de-tribalized, and colonized ancestors. At the core, my practice asks: how do we publicly negotiate power, and what would the world look like without the historical erasure of voices like mine?

I make images in the form of collaborative, socially engaged public art, and I practice this opening up of authorship within my studio pieces as well, often developing ideas with models and subjects, and sharing in the profits from work sold. My speculative narratives reflect and amplify the struggles, resilience, and cultural identities of marginalized communities, including immigrants, indigenous peoples, and people of color living in the USA. Public art is my tool for engaging these themes and for practicing a decentering of the traditional canon in favor of radical subaltern narratives. It is a tenet of my work that collective action is more powerful than the oppressive forces that keep us down.

My work exists between the private and the public, between liberty and ownership, and between the past and the present. Materially, this means that my public art is informed by the context in which it exists, often rooted in history and research, while my studio work reclaims the practices such as Viceroyal painting (16th–18th centuries) and the contemporary diasporic experience of people like myself. These projects can take the form of murals on buildings around the world, installations in galleries and museums, community-centered workshops and skillshares, poster campaigns, or uncommissioned street art popping up in your neighborhood.