Meet Layqa Nuna Yawar
Layqa Nuna Yawar is a Newark-based migrant Latinx artist and muralist who has become well known across the art world due to his large-scale mural projects, which depict and question racism, injustice, and xenophobia. Layqa Nuna Yawar also used his large-scale mural projects to amplify the silenced narratives of people of color in America by celebrating cross-cultural identity, ethnic diversity, and migrant identity.
Layqa Nuna Yawar’s art has been greatly influenced by his own migrant experiences at a young age from Ecuador to the United States. His multicultural identity dramatically informs his artwork as he strives to depict the struggles of ethnic migrants in the Americas. To this end, he uses the mediums of paper, canvas, sculpture, and murals which he believes are all part of a socially engaged process of working in the space between belongingness and migrant alienation.
Although Layqa Nuna Yawar received a traditional visual arts education and received a Bachelors in Fine Arts from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University, his artwork has developed from years of street art interventions and independent work. Today, Layqa Nuna Yawar is the recipient of an Open Society Foundations fellowship known as Moving Walls which funded the development and expansion of various street art projects.
The artist’s main artistic focus is his large-scale mural work, which he considers part of the larger project of using monumental public street art to amplify the silenced voices of cross-cultural migrants who suffer under systemic racism and xenophobia in the United States. However, his practice also extends to curation, production, workshops, and educational lectures. He merges his artistic sensibilities with his political and cultural mission and aims to expand on the possibilities of public mural art through other artists.
In an interview with Jersey Arts, Layqa Nuna Yawar stated that he prefers to use his art to tell stories. Not only does he believe he is telling the shared and collective stories of cross-cultural migration through the people depicted in his work, but he also believes that he uses these tools to tell his own story. Layqa Nuna Yawar believes in the freedom of artists to be able to create whatever they want, wherever they want.
He suggests in the interview that it is not only a matter of freedom when an artist paints a monumental mural in a public space but also a matter of taking responsibility, both over the space and what is being depicted. For him, public murals should not simply be suggestive. They should also be captivating and meaningful, eventually becoming a part of the urban landscape and defining the cultural narratives people relate to.
Layqa Nuna Yawar’s work is more than just artistic. Recently, he led a workshop with immigrant and refugee families with whom he conceptualized a permanent mural to depict and give meaning to their collective struggle. Meanwhile, he is collaborating with Yeimy Gamez Castillo and Four Corners Public Arts to create an exciting project titled ImVisible.
This artist has proven to be a barrier breaker, an artist, an activist, an educator, and much more. Keep your eyes peeled for what Layqa Nuna Yawar has in store next.
