LAYQA NUNA YAWAR

CV


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












Layqa is a public artist and educator whose work explores migration, identity, and collective memory through a socially engaged and community-driven practice.



Biography

Layqa Nuna Yawar is a multidisciplinary artist and educator known for his large-scale public artworks that combine portraiture, symbolism, and storytelling, creating powerful visual narratives that explore issues of displacement, migration, and social equity. Made collaboratively on site, these social sculptures celebrate immigrant narratives, cultural heritage, and social justice struggles. His work aims to amplify underrepresented voices and challenge dominant historical narratives.

A graduate of and current lecturer at Rutgers University, Layqa has created murals worldwide, collaborating with communities and institutions such as the Public Art Fund, MoMA PS1, and NYFA. Recent awards include an Artist Impact Award from the Newark Museum of Art, a Monument Lab Research Residency, a Creative Catalyst Fund Fellowship from the City of Newark, an Art Changemaker Award from the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, and a Moving Walls Fellowship from the Open Society Foundations, among others. 

His recent artwork can be found permanently installed at the new Terminal A at Newark Liberty International Airport, the new headquarters of Make the Road NY, and in cities and communities around the world. 

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.