Newark Airport Mural Project
2022
Excerpts from the New York Times
Move over, La Guardia. Newark Liberty International Airport’s just-completed Terminal A makeover comes with two monumental new works of art. Not since the Works Progress Administration commissioned 10 murals by Arshile Gorky in 1937 for the Newark Airport Administration Building — only two of which still survive, now preserved at the Newark Museum of Art — has the New Jersey airport boasted any significant art to call its own. A ribbon-cutting ceremony Tuesday will inaugurate the one-million-square-foot facility, which is expected to open to the public before the end of the year. “We’ve tried to make art a signature part of the whole airport construction — for them to be appealing and inspiring,” said Rick Cotton, executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the agency overseeing the $2.7 billion redevelopment at Newark as well as the $8 billion transformation of La Guardia Airport.
Layqa Nuna Yawar
“Without Newark, I wouldn’t be the artist I am today — it’s been a beautiful home base,” said Layqa Nuna Yawar, who moved to the Bronx from Ecuador at age 14 and now lives 15 minutes from Newark airport on the greater Lenape territory. “I’m connected to the idea of the airport because I am an immigrant of Indigenous and European descent, who migrated to a place where immigrants collect in the U.S.”
Layqa first began drawing graffiti on walls illegally as a teenager. Now the Rutgers-trained painter works with businesses, institutions and the city on community-based murals in downtown Newark. Leading a large crew of assistants and negotiating multiple layers of approvals with different agencies on the airport project has taken his collaborative practice to a new level.
Personal and cultural narratives inform his vibrant and celebratory mural titled “Between the Future Past,” spanning 350 feet across Terminal A’s arrivals hall and concourse level. Drawing on a cyclical sense of time, Layqa has painted portraits of well-known and obscure figures connected to the site of New Jersey from across history.
A young Lenni-Lenape boy, Mathyias “Laughing Wolf” Ellis, appears repeatedly in full regalia dancing across the panoramic skylines of Newark and Manhattan as viewed from Hoboken, punctuated with native bog turtles and flying egrets, violets and roses — the state flowers of N.J. and N.Y. Representations of the jazz singer Sarah Vaughan, the first Black and Indigenous pilot Bessie Coleman, the transgender-rights activist Marsha P. Johnsonand the photographer Dorothea Lange — all with New Jersey connections — are intermixed with images of unsung airport workers including the mechanic Nathaniel Quaye, originally from Ghana.
“That goes back to the idea of who do we celebrate and who gets to be put on a mural on the scale of a church,” Layqa said. He whittled down his cast of almost 20 characters from some 800 people he researched and photographed. Produced entirely in his studio, the artist printed a background of ghostly images on polyester fabric, on top of which he and his assistants hand-painted all the figures and foreground colors in sections that were then adhered to an aluminum backing on the airport wall.
“The airport is a theater,” the artist said. “It’s like a soapbox, a place where you can reach the whole world.”
