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@vllager

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𝘼. 𝘼𝙙𝙚𝙠𝙪𝙣𝙡𝙚 𝘼𝙙𝙖𝙧𝙖𝙣𝙞𝙟𝙤 is []
𝘵𝘳𝘢𝘯𝘴𝘥𝘪𝘴𝘤𝘪𝘱𝘭𝘪𝘯𝘢𝘳𝘺 𝘢𝘳𝘵𝘪𝘴𝘵 & 𝘤𝘶𝘭𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘢𝘭 𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘥𝘶𝘤𝘦𝘳
𝙈𝙁𝘼 @leroyehoffberger ‘28
⭐️ @ojokorovillage @regal_liv

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𝙞𝙣 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙗𝙚𝙜𝙞𝙣𝙣𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙬𝙖𝙨 𝘼𝙎𝙀, 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙩𝙝𝙖𝙩 𝙡𝙤𝙫𝙚 𝙬𝙖𝙨 𝙖 𝙗𝙚𝙖𝙪𝙩𝙞𝙛𝙪𝙡 𝙧𝙖𝙞𝙣 / 𝙕𝙖𝙮𝙣𝙖𝙗 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙄𝙧𝙚𝙖𝙮𝙤, 2024
acrylic on canvas
68.75 × 71.125 × 2.5 inches

to attempt to distill generations and lineages of contexts into the pictorial and the literary, one will surely find that intimacy and connection is the true heart of this entire matter.
—

documentation by the wonderful @axcreates ⭐️🥇

#araabule #VILLAGER #afroabstracture #afrosensiotics #adekunleadaranijo by @vllager

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15 days ago

Installation view of 𝙪𝙣𝙩𝙞𝙩𝙡𝙚𝙙 (𝙝𝙤𝙬 𝙩𝙤 𝙥𝙡𝙖𝙣 𝙛𝙤𝙧 𝙢𝙮 𝙗𝙪𝙧𝙞𝙖𝙡 𝙥𝙧𝙤𝙘𝙚𝙚𝙙𝙞𝙣𝙜𝙨), 2025
acrylic, glitter, mixed media on canvas
30 x 80 inches
diptych

“He confessed to not being able to do anything about my condition, but after the casting cowries and deciphering their signs, he said: this is a child who didn’t want to be born, but who will always fight with death. I didn’t want to entirely lose contact with the other word of lights and rainbows possibilities. I had buried my secrets early. I buried them in the moonlight, the air alive with white moths. I buried my magic stones, my mirror, my special promises, my golden threads, objects of identity that connected me to the world of spirits. I buried them all in a secret place which I promptly forgot”

“You are a child of miracles, Many powers are on your side”

“The road will never swallow you, The river of your destiny will always overcome evil. May you understand
your fate. Suffering will never destroy you, but will make you stronger. Success will never confuse you or
scatter your spirit, but will make you fly higher into the good sunlight. Your life will always surprise you”

———

on view in 𝘿𝙚𝙫𝙤𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣, 𝘿𝙧𝙚𝙖𝙢𝙨, 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝘿𝙚𝙨𝙩𝙞𝙣𝙮- a solo exhibition of works by the Nigerian–born Transdisciplinary Artist, VILLAGER (b. A. Adekunle Adaranijo) on view @eubieblakecenter through October 11, 2025

Documentation by Kristofer Heng

#araabule #araabule #VILLAGER #devotiondreamsanddestiny #adekunleadaranijo taken in Eubie Blake National Jazz Institute and Cultural Center by @vllager

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a year ago

Thank you to @caraober and the entire BmoreArt @bmoreart team for bestowing me the grand honor of being included in the newest “The Future” Issue No. 21.

I have a thousand words in my right hand. and infinity in the other. only two can make it out this pouch of mystic love. Thank you!

Thank you to my mentors, current and past whose relentlessness has pushed me to continuously and boldly become. Thank you to the collectors, gallerists, collaborators, organizations, and curators who honestly i have learned so much from by the way they have received, held, and created space for my work. I am thankful to be recognized within the caliber of artistic and cultural production which is made possible here in Baltimore, which frankly is why I have been able to grow so much here.

I look up to a lot of artists here, they inspire me to continue to investigate the osmotic relationship between time, place, body, sense, spirit, memory, and material, tracing how they permeably shape and transform our architectures of being, seeing, and knowing in the world. Truthfully, I respect this city. This vibrant, culturally rich city helped me grow and become as sharp as I've ever been. The ways in which memory, meaning, and world-making happens here will always energize me towards making work and producing a practice that envisions transformative healing pathways across the future-present-past.

Thank you to everyone who truly believes in the potency of the work, championing my name in spaces where the eye cannot reach and saw it fit to root me within such dynamic cohort of world builders. Thank you to Olodumare! GOD! Thank you to the ancestors! Thank you my family! Thank you to the benevolent forces which catalyze this existence, to my great grandmother, and my entire lineage which runs strong within me. And a blissful thank you to myself for remaining committed to the work, the learning, and the becoming.

This moment makes me even more excited for my 10-year Baltimore Anniversary in 2028! and the 10 more beyond that. for those who are looking for me, i’ll be outside outside soon i promise.

The work seems to have just begun! let’s start!

❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥
-
also go pick up a copy taken in Brown Center by @vllager

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4 months ago

𝘴𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘦𝘪𝘨𝘯 𝘪𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘰𝘶 𝘴𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘦𝘪𝘨𝘯 𝘸𝘦 𝘢𝘳𝘦, 2026
acrylic, acrylic skin and glitter on canvas
52 x 36 inches

documentation by @axcreates

“I am interested in sovereignty as freedom from, within, beyond and through something—an image emerging from a spatial field of color relationships, a narrative effusing from the imprints of a body, a scar made to let the light in, the wisdom of sensing with the fullness of being— and even more so a way of computing and understanding our relationship to the forces that constitute us. Ancestry, memory, tradition, spirituality, migration, place, history, and culture are constantly moving through us, shaping and transforming us as we move through them. What does it mean to have agency within these relations? What do we inherit before we have the capacity to choose? What do we carry because it is ours, because it was given to us, because we chose to identify with it’s imposition upon us, or because we have decided to carry it forward?” says the artist

joyed that 𝘴𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘦𝘪𝘨𝘯 𝘪𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘰𝘶 𝘴𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘦𝘪𝘨𝘯 𝘸𝘦 𝘢𝘳𝘦 is in my solo exhibition titled “𝙑𝙄𝙇𝙇𝘼𝙂𝙀𝙍: 𝙨𝙤𝙫𝙚𝙧𝙚𝙞𝙜𝙣 𝙞𝙨 𝙢𝙮 𝙩𝙧𝙖𝙙𝙞𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣” now on view at Hotel Indigo | 24 West Franklin Street made possible in fruitful collaboration with Maryland Art Place.

Actively investigating the liminal intersections of material memory and sensory intelligence, migration, Yorùbá knowledge production, and postcolonial African identity, VILLAGER synthesizes their paintings into a dynamic topography of critical inquiry into the poetics of relational interplay between objects, bodies, and spaces, utilizing layers and applications of color, movement, rhythm, layering, texture, pattern, scarification, and mark-making to examine how form, design (beauty aesthetic), function, and content intersect to produce alternate ways of seeing, being, and knowing rooted in the post-colonial Afro-futurist consciousness. Their work is often characterized by undulating and errant, neural-like, semi-circular woven patterned marks and gestural scars that take form through an amalgamation of abstraction, figuration, and collaging traditions, emerging as a sover by @vllager

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4 days ago

details of 𝘴𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘦𝘪𝘨𝘯 𝘪𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘰𝘶 𝘴𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘦𝘪𝘨𝘯 𝘸𝘦 𝘢𝘳𝘦, 2026

documentation by AX @axcreates

#araabule #VILLAGER #afroabstracture #afrosensiotics #adekunleadaranijo by @vllager

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7 days ago

𝘢 𝘮𝘰 𝘢𝘳𝘢 𝘸𝘢 / 𝘪 𝘣𝘦𝘭𝘰𝘯𝘨, 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘣𝘦𝘭𝘰𝘯𝘨, 𝘸𝘦 𝘣𝘦𝘭𝘰𝘯𝘨, 2026
acrylic on canvas
36 x 36 inches

first grad school warmups, returning back to spring forward and thinking about how color has the capacity and potential to create space—space as where we can experience and or speak to an experience of identity and belonging. Through the work i’m also wandering about thinking of how to hold simultaneous contrasts and differences and maybe a metaphysical delineation of a feeling of a common language which simulates and encodes our expressions and experiences of worlds seen and unseen, and one another.

documentation by AX @axcreates

#araabule #VILLAGER #afroabstracture #afrosensiotics #adekunleadaranijo by @vllager

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13 days ago

𝘧𝘪 𝘪𝘣𝘢𝘯𝘶𝘫𝘦 𝘴𝘦 𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘯 / 𝘧𝘳𝘰𝘮 𝘨𝘳𝘪𝘦𝘧 𝘵𝘰 𝘩𝘢𝘱𝘱𝘪𝘯𝘦𝘴𝘴?, 2023
acrylic on canvas
36 x 36 inches

In 2023, I became concerned again with how the acrylic material could be further explored; however, this time through a more conceptual perspective that allowed the paintings themselves to respond to space and context without being formally told to do so. I became preoccupied with the idea of time, both in the consideration of process contextualized within the paintings, as well as the concept of time as inspired by the Yorùbá and Bakongo cosmograms, which characterize time as a cyclical phenomenon.

Circular forms stylized and reinterpreted in the paintings began to dominate as imprints of portals and traces of memories manifested as temporal structures or into different light and color worlds that symbiotically interact with our sense of beginnings and endings. The spaces began unfolding through an intentional subtraction of the charged abstract space, focusing on the simultaneous contrasts of color and the complexity of color relationships that render ideas about time and space into a discursive network which offered a simultaneous excavation of the history of the painting itself, the artists’ own experience and the internal architectures available to the viewer’s imagination—revealing all of the disparate parts that sacrificed itself into the becoming of the larger whole.

The universality of the circular form, which could be interpreted and sensed as individual cells, rock-like earth forms, sun or moon or planets, or even the internal architectural rings of trees which tell a history about the time and space of the object, also rendered itself available to ideas around memory, experience, and possibility, encouraging non-linear relationships about passage, departure, return and the transformative experiences that become livened and possible within and through the paintings as a naturalized space.

documentation by AX @axcreates

#araabule #VILLAGER #afroabstracture #afrosensiotics #adekunleadaranijo by @vllager

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12 days ago

+1 on this blessed realm of dreams and reality as some kind of proof of what refuses to be erased and continues to sustain. i spent my birthday morning moving into my new studio at the Leroy E Hoffberger School of Painting MFA Program @micagrad and starting off some new work. devotion is my first birthday gift to myself

shoutout God, the Ancestors and the primordial ones. thanks to everyone of you who makes living richer and each passing second enjoyable .

accepting offerings in form of positive psychic endearment, affirmative words of prayer & encouragement and tangible 💵 coins to sustain my work if you feeling frisky

gratitude, shining. love love love. we go again!!!
#horsesdontstoptheykeepgoing #virgo
🕴️✨♦️ taken in Graduate Studies at MICA by @vllager

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a month ago

𝙤𝙟𝙪 𝙞𝙣𝙪 𝙣𝙞 𝙖 𝙛𝙞 𝙠𝙤 𝙞𝙡𝙚 𝙖𝙮𝙚 / 𝙠𝙚𝙚𝙥 𝙧𝙚-𝙙𝙧𝙚𝙖𝙢𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙬𝙤𝙧𝙡𝙙 𝙬𝙞𝙩𝙝 𝙢𝙤𝙧𝙚 𝙡𝙞𝙜𝙝𝙩, 2023
acrylic on canvas
36 x 36 x 1.5 inches

it is our duty to keep re-dreaming the world - Ben Okri

#araabule #VILLAGER #afroabstracture #afrosensiotics #adekunleadaranijo by @vllager

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14 days ago

“In some cities the heat empties the calendar but in Baltimore, between The Compound and Current Space, Baltimore’s art scene is offering some of its most innovative programming of the year. Materio-Mancy closes with an artist talk on Saturday, August 22, and both shows at Current close with artist talks on Sunday, September 13.”

Read at BmoreArt.com:: Gallery Round-Up: Current Space and The Compound ✨
Two Group Shows and a Solo Exhibition by Marian April Glebes Remind Us Why Baltimore’s Artist-Run Spaces are the Best Spots to See Exciting, Fresh Art this Summer ☀️

Words: Patrick Bell @patbellart taken in Baltimore, Maryland by @vllager

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a month ago

details of 𝙞𝙣 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙗𝙚𝙜𝙞𝙣𝙣𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙬𝙖𝙨 𝘼𝙎𝙀, 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙩𝙝𝙖𝙩 𝙡𝙤𝙫𝙚 𝙬𝙖𝙨 𝙖 𝙗𝙚𝙖𝙪𝙩𝙞𝙛𝙪𝙡 𝙧𝙖𝙞𝙣 / 𝙕𝙖𝙮𝙣𝙖𝙗 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙄𝙧𝙚𝙖𝙮𝙤, 2024
acrylic on canvas
68.75 × 71.125 × 2.5 inches

now on view for “Vital Beauty: Narratives Through the American Body” group exhibition curated by Edmund Savage @edsavage_media in the Center for the Arts gallery at Towson University @tucofac @tugalleries

Vital Beauty explores what it means to be in—or from—America, and how this place—its land, communities, and histories—imprints itself on the body. Through various mediums, the artists in the exhibition weave together stories of resistance and endurance by centering the experiences of Black people. Their works trace narratives of place—stories soaked in violence, vitality, and joy, in erased histories and in fully lived lives—that form the core of the American experience. If love is an intentional act—a commitment to connection to oneself and between the self and others—then these works imagine love as a form of resistance and risk. They explore how the effects of violence imprint on the body, impacting perceptions of time and memory, but their work also points to preservation under dominant rule through love, collective care, and action. To stand inside these narratives is to confront the fragile terrain of “truth” in our contemporary moment.

The exhibition is now on view from June 11- July 11, 2026

—

#araabule #VILLAGER #afroabstracture #afrosensiotics #adekunleadaranijo by @vllager

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3 months ago

a few moments from the opening reception night of 𝑴𝒂𝒕𝒆𝒓𝒊𝒐-𝒎𝒂𝒏𝒄𝒚 guest-curated by Nigerian-born Transdisciplinary artist and Cultural Producer VILLAGER @vllager at the Compound Baltimore @thecompoundbaltimore .

We are wholeheartedly grateful to everyone who attended and engaged with us in this powerful celebration of this cultural convergence and participated in witnessing the sonical and movement performance from @regal_liv and @xxglitterwitchxx

as 𝑴𝒂𝒕𝒆𝒓𝒊𝒐-𝒎𝒂𝒏𝒄𝒚 wishes to implicate the materials, the artist, and the light matter transmitted from their mind to their hand, to the viewer and their senses—passing onto them the mystery of this unending business of concealing and revealing, in a magical final act of witnessing, we invite you the viewers to continue to engage with the exhibition in ways that are meaningful to you.

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Gallery Hours: Fri & Sat 12 – 4 PM, Tue – Thur by appointment only. 𝑴𝒂𝒕𝒆𝒓𝒊𝒐-𝒎𝒂𝒏𝒄𝒚 is on view at the Compound Baltimore, 2239 Kirk Ave, till August 22, 2026

Mark your calendars for the closing Reception Artist Talk on August 22, 2026, from 5 PM - 8 PM, moderated by @iamrickyparker Ricky Parker (Curator at Reginald F Lewis Museum) and @taaaaaroooooo Taro Cantú (Independent curator). more details to follow

#materiomancy taken in The Compound by @vllager

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2 months ago