I’m a multidisciplinary artist and storyteller using photography, poetry, and film to archive Black life as ritual, resistance, and radical imagination. Rooted in the South Side of Chicago and shaped by global Black traditions, my work centers memory, movement, and the sacred beauty of everyday survival.
cirica. 2017
I create in the space between grief and prayer—where bipolarity, Blackness, masculinity, and spiritual memory intersect in ways that are both tender and terrifying. Whether in the form of a poem, a digital altar, a triptych, a film, or a classroom dialogue, I’m trying to name what we’ve survived and imagine what we’ve yet to become.
As a poet, I’ve built collections (learning rhythm, ON GOD, THERE ARE MANY WAYS TO SAY OUR NAME) that function as biomyths—fusing journaling, ancestral invocation, and emotional mapping. These books are not simply publications; they are rituals. They are testaments to the joy and volatility of being alive while Black, male, bipolar, and spiritual in a world that often misnames all of that.
As a visual artist, I use collage, lo-fi digital layering, typography, and photography to create contemporary visual griot work—triptychs, altars, and motion stills that honor rest, loss, ritual, and joy as sacred. I lean into textures that feel like breath. My aesthetic is not polished—it is personal. It carries the weight of improvisation, much like jazz, grief, and memory.
Academically, my work is an inquiry into how Black storytelling reclaims what institutions erase. I explore the poetics of survival and performance as both testimony and theory. I do not believe art and scholarship are separate—I believe they are echoes of the same sacred responsibility: to make meaning out of what almost killed us.
Ultimately, I create to build altars. For myself. For my lineage. For the Black boys who weren’t allowed to cry. For the mothers who never stopped. For the ghosts who whisper in my dreams. For the living. For the ones still trying to be.
— Antonio Foli (formerly kwabena foli)