Àdégbòyégà Ọlúkúnlé Aróhùnmọlàṣé · b. 1979, Nigeria
A multidisciplinary artist and art educator whose work delves deeply into migration, identity, and cultural heritage — weaving African wax print fabric, hot glue, rug tufting, enameled copper, and pyrography into layered records of what is carried, what is lost, and what is remade in a new place.
Threads of Belonging, 2025 — hot glue sticks, African wax print fabric, acrylic, 44″ × 44″
The thirteen titled works of the portfolio, 2023–2025 — from the Routes and Roots series to letters burned into wood and poems pressed onto hemp paper. The portfolio's panel, detail, and letter-page images appear inside each work's viewer. Select any work to read its full story.
Three videos from the Portifolio of work (migration, cultural heritage, and identity) folder — a poetry film, a video performance, and the Lágbájá and Tàmedù performance. Each video opens in Google Drive for playback.
Ten short vertical videos, one for each of the migration odù in his study of Odù Ifá — the binary wisdom system whose chapters are written in two columns of single and double marks. In each video, green binary numbers rain down over a bàtà drum tune; hidden bold among them are the odù's own numbers, which gather at the end to form its two-column marks over the falling numbers. The odù's name sits at the top of each video, and its theme scrolls slowly along the bottom. Each video opens in Google Drive for playback.
Àdégbòyégà Aróhùnmọ̀làṣé is a multidisciplinary artist and art educator based in the United States whose work delves deeply into themes of migration, identity, and cultural heritage. His practice seamlessly weaves mixed media and writing, influenced by the visual language of Abstract Expressionism and shaped by patterns, materials, and textures drawn from his cultural traditions.
Central to his practice is an innovative use of materials — African wax print fabric, hot glue sticks, rug tufting, enameled copper, and pyrography — to articulate the complex, multi-layered nature of identity and belonging. The wax print fabric, cut, reshaped, and layered, reflects the hybrid nature of cultural identity: its capacity to transform while retaining connections to history. Hot glue becomes a metaphor for the reconstruction of identity in the face of migration — the often-invisible bonds that connect individuals to their cultural roots, even amidst displacement.
He also incorporates poetry and letter writing, in Yoruba and English, often integrated into visual works through pyrography — burning letters and images into wood and handmade paper so that personal reflection becomes a lasting embodiment of memory and heritage. His current research, Routes, Roots and Memory, investigates how Yoruba visual culture acts as a living, traveling system of cultural memory in new places.
He received his MFA in Art Studio from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville in December 2025, and is now a graduate fellow at the University of Texas at Austin.
A symbol of cultural heritage and an evolving representation of identity — deconstructed, layered, and remade into three-dimensional storytelling.
Intricate Yoruba ona patterns drawn in glue — the invisible bonds binding individuals to their roots through displacement.
A tactile, labor-intensive, meditative engagement with memory and tradition — continuity and rootedness in physical form.
Inspired by African adornment traditions; its light and texture bridge the historical and the contemporary, honoring diasporic resilience.
Letters and images burned into wood and handmade paper — what is scorched cannot be undone; the word made permanent.
Writing in Yoruba and English — letters across two centuries, poems of departure, culture shock, and arrival.
From his study of Odù Ifá — a binary wisdom system of 256 chapters — two verses that speak to healing and adaptability for immigrants moving to unfamiliar lands.
“E wò mi dé, mo wá sáláyé Àwọn òbí kò tọ́ mi sórùn Mo sùn nílé aláruru Mo jí gbádìẹ alááyé Ifá ni kí n rọ òrìṣà fún ìrìn mi dáàbò bò mi.”
“Look at me, I have arrived safely. My parents did not tie me to their necks (they released me). I slept in a land of strangers; I woke up in the land of the living. Ifá advises me to honor the Orisa for protection on my journey.”
“Ota omi ń b'omi l'okun, omi ń b'omi l'osa A díá fún ẹni tó ń lọ sóde òkèèrè Nítorí ẹbọ ní wọ́n fi ní kí ó rú Ó rúbọ, ó gbèdáre Nísinsìnyí, gbogbo ayé ń gbàá l'áyọ̀.”
“The water of the ocean meets the water of the lagoon. This was the Ifá cast for the one traveling to a foreign land. They were advised to make sacrifices; they made the sacrifices and found blessings. Now, the world embraces them with joy.”
Àdégbóyègá Olukunle Aróhùnmọlásè — artist and art educator, based in Austin, Texas.
Full CV, including certifications, leadership, and community engagement, available on request. References available on request.
For exhibition, commission, and sales enquiries — or to request the full CV — get in touch directly.
@adegboyega19.79 — the artist’s personal page, with studio work and exhibitions.
Open InstagramPortfolio of Work — the twenty paintings from the MFA portfolio (2019–2021), presented here with the artist statement as written in that portfolio.
My artistic practice was influenced by three factors: Abstract Expressionism, Shapes and Patterns. My work explores the use of geometric or biomorphic shapes and strong colours, characterized by dense and unexpected structures with a conviction to intense build up and obscuration through patterning. There is a compelling tension between the trace of my brush strokes with the materiality of the paint itself. Finally, my asymmetric distribution of colour with distinct accents makes it rich chromatically in which an order is animated by the disorder.
I mostly express feelings through my paintings rather than illustrate them. I let myself go. I thought little of houses and trees, but applied colour stripes and spots to the canvas. My style over time was influenced by (Abstract Expressionism artists) like Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Helen Frankenthaler and Ghanaian sculptor El Anatsui’s installations “fading cloth” which is on display at the St. Louis Art Museum (SLAM). This can be seen in my paintings like Delirium 2019, Reflection 2021 and Wrinkles 2021 to mention few. I most often creates with acrylic, collage on canvas and paper.
— Arohunmolase, Adegboyega Olukunle, Portfolio of Work. Select any work below to view it larger.
Adegboyega Olukunle Arohunmolase · Àdégbòyégà Ọlúkúnlé Aróhùnmọlàṣé · b. May 25, 1979, Nigeria
Adegboyega Olukunle Arohunmolase is a Nigerian-born artist and art educator based in Austin, Texas. He received his MFA in Art Studio from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville in December 2025 — completing the degree with a 4.0 GPA and a thesis exhibition, Cartographies of Belonging: Identity and Heritage in Transit, at the Fuller Dome Gallery — and is now a graduate fellow in Art and Art History at the University of Texas at Austin, supported by the Alton Diserens Endowment Scholarship and the College of Fine Arts / Graduate School Distinguished Graduate Fellowship (2026). He holds a B.A. in Fine and Applied Arts from Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria (2005), and speaks Yoruba and English.
His artistic practice delves deeply into themes of migration, identity, and cultural heritage. Working across mixed media and writing, he fuses unconventional materials — African wax print fabric, hot glue sticks, rug tufting, enameled copper, beads, and pyrography — with Yoruba language, poetry, performance, and letter writing. His work is influenced by the visual language of Abstract Expressionism and shaped by engagement with the patterns, materials, and textures of his cultural traditions.
Before his MFA, he taught Art & Design in Nigerian schools from 2009 to 2016 — including as Department Head at Oxford Scholar Academy — and served as Artist-in-Residence and Instructor at Picturesque Gallery & Institute of Fine Art, Akure, from 2016 to 2022. At SIUE he taught Foundations Studio courses as Instructor of Record. He has illustrated eleven published books, and his scholarship includes his MFA thesis Reimagining Art: The Fusion of Unconventional Materials and Cultural Narratives (2025) and a paper on Yinka Shonibare presented at the European Conference on Arts & Humanities in London (2025).
His current thesis project, Routes, Roots and Memory, asks how Yoruba visual culture acts as cultural memory in new places. He argues that Yoruba visual culture is a living, traveling system of memory — not a fixed tradition — carried, transformed, and remade through contemporary African and diasporic art, across chapters on Yoruba visual culture as a living system, the routes of diaspora, Ona modernism and sign systems, and his own studio case studies.
His work is currently on view in Burned, Bound, and Becoming, a two-person exhibition with Hannah Kwafo at the Catapult Creative House Gallery, Southeast Missouri State University (November 6–27, 2026). He also creates Yoruba Chronicles, a narrated video series on ancient Yoruba history.
My work comes from my own experience as a migrant — and from my friends, the people I know who left home searching for something better. We left searching for utopia, but I have come to understand that utopia is not a place on a map. It is a state of mind. You carry it with you, the way you carry your language, your mother's patterns, the marks of where you are from. Aeternalopolis, my imagined city, sits at coordinates where the map shows only ocean — because the place we are looking for cannot be found on Google Maps. It can only be found through memory, through story, through the textures of a lived life.
I carry that longing into my materials. The African wax print fabric is my heritage made visible — I cut it, deconstruct it, and layer it again, because that is what migration does to identity: it takes us apart and asks us to remake ourselves, and in the remaking the pattern is changed but not lost. Hot glue is my binding — the invisible bonds that hold a person to their roots even across an ocean; fragile-looking, but it holds. Enameled copper carries the adornment traditions of home, its colors refusing to fade. The beads on Lágbájá and Tàmedù veil the face the way migration veils us — Lágbájá means “nobody in particular,” and every migrant knows what it is to become anonymous in a new land. And fire — pyrography — is how I write my letters, burning Yoruba words into wood, because what is burned cannot be unwritten. Some messages must be made permanent.
In Exodus, I watch the materials themselves migrate: dense with tribal marks and beads at the root, dispersing as they rise toward the utopian panel. Something is always lost on the journey — I will not pretend otherwise. Letters go unanswered. Names are mispronounced. The copper loses its marks. But my work insists on the other half of the truth: migration reshapes people without erasing them. The shard does not always need to return to one original vessel. Identity is not isolated; it is woven — through lineage, through culture, through the friends who make the journey beside us, through the children we write letters to before they are born.
To burn is to mark. To bind is to keep. To become is to continue. That is what these works are: records of movement — what is carried, what is lost to the flame, and what is remade on the other side.
