About
Adeyemi Adegbesan is a Toronto-based multimedia artist whose practice spans photography, digital illustration, collage, film, VR, and large-scale public art. Working across physical and digital mediums, Adegbesan constructs layered visual environments that explore Afrofuturism and the Black collective unconscious as living, evolving systems rather than fixed identities.
Rooted in assemblage and collage, his work draws from everyday materials and visual residues; street advertising, industrial surfaces, and fragmented imagery; to mirror diasporic formation itself: cultures shaped through accumulation, improvisation, and recombination. These layered surfaces function as sites of memory and projection, where fragments of public language are disrupted and reassembled to speak from, rather than to, Black experience.
By situating his practice within speculative futures, Adegbesan creates conceptual distance from inherited socio-political frameworks, allowing Black plurality, cohesion, and possibility to emerge without being constrained by linear historical narratives. Figures and forms within his work exist in relation to these materially dense grounds, positioned as presences within a broader collective field rather than isolated subjects.
Adegbesan’s work has been exhibited across Canada and internationally, and his practice continues to move fluidly between commercial, institutional, and public contexts while maintaining a consistent philosophical core centered on cultural continuity, transformation, and futurity.
Exhibitions
2024 A Dream of Return (group show) | Carleton University Art Gallery | Ottawa, ON
2024 Hunt, Gather, Remix | Robert Langen Gallery | Waterloo, ON
2022 Adorned (group show) | Art Gallery of Greater Victoria | Victoria, BC
2022 In These Truths (group show) | Albright-Knox Northland Museum | Buffalo, NY
2020 Ascension Tech | Harbourfront Centre | Toronto, ON
2019 1000 Paths Home | Union Station | Toronto, ON
2019 Holding Space | Project (Patel) Gallery | Toronto, ON
2018-19 Art, Beats & Lyrics (group show) | various venues | Richmond, VA; Birmingham, AL; Chicago, IL; St. Louis, MS; Houston, TX; Miami, FL; Charlotte, NC; Louisville, KY;
2018 Manifesto Art Show (group show) | 146 Ossington | Toronto, ON
2016 Sawubona (group show) | Daniels Spectrum | Toronto, ON
2015 Black Future Month: 3015 (group show) | OCAD University | Toronto, ON
2014 Black Future Month: 3014 (group show) | Daniels Spectrum | Toronto, ON
Commissions and Public Art
2024 Junos/ONX/The Space Between Us | I feel it (That’s How I Know They Will Feel It), VR Installation | Halifax, NS
2023 Translink Public Art Initiative | Look For Us In The Whirlwind | Vancouver, BC
2022 Nuit Blanche | Those Who Watch Over Us | Toronto, ON
2022 Buffalo AKG Art Museum: Public Art Initiative | Queen City Mural | Toronto, ON
2021 ArtworxTO Hub North | AllCity Shine Mural | Toronto, ON
2021 Toronto History Museums: Awakenings | Luminary: Mary Ann Shadd Mural | Toronto, ON
2020 Nuit Blanche | Virtual (AR) installation | Toronto, ON
2020 Artscape Launchpad | Black Lives Matter Wall Mural | Toronto, ON
2020 HBO | Virtual (VR) experience | Toronto, ON
2020 Toronto Raptors | Black Lives Matter branding and apparel design | Toronto, ON
2020 Erykah Badu | Illustration | Dallas, TX
2019 Instagram | Afropunk Festival Virtual (AR) installation | Brooklyn, NY; Atlanta, GA
2018 Lauryn Hill | Branding and apparel design | New York, NY
Collaborations
Afropunk
Toronto Raptors
Random House Books
Utopia Falls
Haviah Mighty
Lauryn Hill
Obuxum
HarperCollins
a l l i e
Uninterrupted