Stars and Portals: Wale Ali and Villager Exhibition | Opening Reception
Friday, June 20 :: 6pm
@ Creative Alliance
In STARS & PORTALS, Nigerian-born artists Adewale Alli and VILLAGER unite in a transcendent visual dialogue between cosmos and spirit. Here, stars and portals form the conceptual framework: stars as celestial guides, markers of destiny, light, and cosmic navigation; portals as metaphysical structures, spiritual gateways, and temporal passageways of memory and ancestral possibility.
Together, their works create an immersive landscape where the metaphysical and the material intertwine. Alli’s star paintings explore the boundless expanse of the universe, drawing on the cosmic and emotional resonance of abstraction. Through fire, texture, and form, he channels the brilliance and chaos of stellar birth and death, using stars as symbolic language for resilience, destruction, and rebirth. His canvases become constellations of feeling, mapping the unseen emotional universes within and beyond.
In dialogue, VILLAGER’s portal series offers a rooted counterpoint grounded in Yorùbá spirituality and Afrocentric futurism–reaching through time and memory. These circular forms act as energetic vessels, temporal passageways, and visual manifestations of ancestral wisdom and nonlinear time. Interwoven with materials, cowries, and pigments, each portal pulses the energy of transition, possibility, and return. They are windows into different worlds, folding time upon itself and offering new visions for how we understand beginnings and endings; being, belonging, and becoming.
STARS & PORTALS is a sacred mapping that invites viewers to trace the lines between personal and cosmic, past and future, the terrestrial and the divine. Through this shared cosmology, Alli and VILLAGER illuminate a path for reimagining self, history, and possibility—through the guidance of stars and the passage of portals.
Artist Bio
VILLAGER (b. Abdul Rasheed Adekunle Adaranijo in Lagos, Nigeria) is a Nigerian-born International Artist, Cultural Producer, and African Spirituality Practitioner whose work exists to scrutinize, deconstruct, and redefine what it means to be a “Contemporary African” by exploring the complex yet evolving intersections of post-colonial identity, cultural heritage, material intelligence, and knowledge production. Trained as a Water Microbiologist and Environmental Researcher, VILLAGER earned a B.S. in Environmental Chemistry from Towson University in 2020. They have presented solo exhibitions ÀṢẸ: Embodying the Divine (2024), and BUSH BOY! (2022) in Baltimore, MD. VILLAGER’s work has also been exhibited in numerous group exhibitions including, Sou(l): Mostra de Arte Afro-Diaspórica, Artspace Vigidal, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Diasporic Crossing, Southside Contemporary, Richmond, VA, BLAQ SHEEP, Superchief Gallery LA, Los Angeles, CA, AFROFUTURISM: 100 years after the Harlem Renaissance, Papermill Playhouse, Millburn, NJ to name a few. VILLAGER’s work has been featured in publications such as BmoreART, Baltimore Banner, and NUNAR, and has received several awards including the Baltimore Mayor’s Office Individual Artist Award (2025). VILLAGER’s artwork can be found in private art collections in Los Angeles, Baltimore, and Rio de Janeiro.
Adewale Alli
Adewale (b. 1993, Nigeria) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Baltimore whose work reimagines humanity’s place in the cosmos. Working primarily across sculpture, painting and performance. Adewale constructs immersive, large-scale installations that blend celestial vision with physical form, offering portals into what he describes as “the architecture of divine energy.”
His practice investigates the balance between the infinite and the intimate, using vivid contrast, textured surfaces, and cosmological symbolism to confront the viewer with the unknown, not as something distant, but as a mirror of the self. Stars, seen as both engines of life and ancestral forces, emerge as central motifs across his work, guiding a deeper reflection on identity, divinity, and the universal cycles that bind us.
Adewale’s work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions throughout the U.S., including at Eleanor & Hopps Gallery, Heather Grey Gallery, and the Contemporary Arts Network. He has been featured in BmoreArt Magazine and is represented in private and institutional collections across Baltimore, Virginia and New York.
