"Following the death of his father, Djutjadjutja Munuŋgurr in 1999, Minyapa became the leader of the Djapu' clan.

In the annals of Australian art history, there are few dynasties whose impact has been as profound as the Munuŋgurr family. Their patriarch Woŋgu was a figure of inestimable power, who had over twenty wives and sixty children. Working with the anthropologist Donald Thomson, in 1935 Woŋgu kickstarted the bark painting movement in northeast Arnhem Land, giving non-Indigenous Australians a new awareness of Indigenous justice and land ownership.

Skip forward sixty years, and it was Woŋgu’s son Djutjadjutja who rekindled this fire, ushering in a new era of monumental bark painting in the early 1990s through the Buku-Larrŋgay Mulka Art Centre.

Around Djutjadjutja emerged a school of talent arguably greater than his own—his wife Noŋgirrŋa Marawili, his daughers Marrnyula and Rerrkirrwaŋa, and his sons Minyapa and Meŋa forming the nucleus of new renaissance at Wäṉḏawuy.

Of this group, Minyapa was the least prolific: his entire output numbering less than a few dozen works. But each one is made with power and authority. Andrew Blake, who worked closely with Minyapa, described him as “large in everything.” As we stare into the shimmering grid, it is worth recognizing that Wäṉḏawuy Mäṉaŋur is a painting that is large in meaning—meanings that most of us will never know. For Miyapa, they were written into his being as a child of Mäna, a shark person, born of the earth as it was, is, and forever will be"

– HENRY SKERRITT