The Dwell 24: Tejumola Butler Adenuga

Tejumola Butler Adenuga was supposed to be a chemical engineer. Born in a small town near Lagos, Nigeria, he moved to London when he was in high school and took inspiration from what he was seeing on the internet to start drawing, secretly, though he had already been told his career path at birthU. "I couldn’t just tell my parents, oh, I want to be an artist," he says. So graphic design was the intermediary. ("The first thing they did was check the starting salary. And they’re like, ‘oh, not bad.’") After being encouraged by a friend to put together an exhibition of his work, in 2015, Adidas reached out—a missive Adenuga initially ignored, thinking it was either spam or a scam. The eventual successful collaboration under his belt "became the trigger for my self-belief that if I can do this now, the sky’s the limit." He’s since worked across mediums with outlets ranging from the New York Times to Soho.Home.Studio.