Alex Belardo Kostiw’s publishing practice, drawing closer to parts and possibilities of everyday reality. It spans
artist’s books and zines, and spatial books, which transform a book into a site.
Rooted in visual communication and print, these works deal in poetic, adapted, and iterative elements, visual structures of comics, and conceptually driven forms.
︎info
book/marks, 2019 —
This series crystallizes those aimless images and thoughts that I keep returning to, while exploring the possibilities of a 7 x 2-inch format.
IV: Somewhere, a witch wanders, wandless
16 pages, accordion fold, risograph, 2024, 7 x 2 inches
In book/mark IV, a witch seeks her missing friend, slipping and tumbling, pacing and falling through panel after panel, page after page. Will she ever find it?
III: 6 Wings
6 pages, accordion fold, reduction woodcut, glue, 2022, 7 x 2 inches
6 Wings reimagines the mythological multi-limbed, winged Geryon, whom Hercules murdered for his red cows. Few depictions of Geryon have survived antiquity. To echo that, making this book, a reduction woodcut print with collaged covers, involved destroying the print matrix and parts of the prints. The book embraces Geryon as a fugitive body—forever beyond our grasp.
II: Wendr
12 pages, saddle-stitch binding, risograph, 7 x 2 inches
Wendr is a spell, cast on me by a stick I saw on the ground c. 2017. Years later, I was still thinking about it. Ruminating on magical wands, the book changes in orientation and reading direction so that reading it is akin to the pull and push of energy that characterizes magic.
Meanwhile, a witch wanders, wandless...
I: A Name
12 pages, saddle-stitch binding, risograph, 7 x 2 inches
A Name is a brief, personal reflection on what it might mean to make a person. With images that allude to Greek mythology, Penelope, “the name without a girl,” is my idea of a daughter.
Pakiramdam (ii)
Risograph prints, accordion fold in folio, and saddle-stitched pamphlet, 8.5 x 5.5 inches each.
This revisits a spatial book of the same name, offering another mode of encountering its narrative. While the spatial book was site-specific and temporary, this print edition leans into the places that no longer exist except in familial imagination. The edition is variable, featuring different selections of altered family photos. It is a collection of thoughts on how migration often leads to fragmentation within a family—not just separating them from each other, but from a collective sense of home.
Sa Salita—Stories He Took with Him
26 pages, stab-stitch binding with fold-out pages, laserjet, 8.5 x 5.5 inches
A collection of fragments of my grandfather’s stories set alongside drawings of his hand gestures. Each page unfolds to reveal illustrations, bits of personal photos, and reproduced woodcuts that reference Filipino folktales and myths, my grandfather’s life and migration, and the dining table where I would sit across from my grandfather and listen. Together images and texts describe a dozen stories and imply many more.
3 Waves
Three accordion folds, 22 pages each, in an envelope, risograph, 2.5 x 2.75 inches
This is a collection about water: glancing along a beach; stirring inside a body; and shaping a human world. The text is assembled from bits and pieces of articles about exploration. The accordion-fold structure and slow revelatory rhythm are haiku-like—as the landscape unfolds, our sense of the scene at hand expands and shifts. Printed on the reverse side of each book is a black-and-white image of water.
Enchiridion C.B.
36 pages, saddle-stitch binding and accordion fold, risograph and laserjet, 10.25 x 5 inches
The mythology of a trickster-god known as “Cate Blanchett,” in four parts: lexicon, cosmogenesis, epiphany, and artifacts. Enchiridion explores the arc of a god’s multiplicitous existence, the language of worship, and mythology as a means to understanding phenomena of the self. Manipulated and original images, tropes relating to divinity, and motifs repeating across multiple narratives imagine “Cate Blanchett” as a figure between reality and infinite possibilities—a reflection of ourselves.
Finalist for the Broken Pencil Awards.
books
are
︎ Alex Belardo Kostiw
Alex Belardo Kostiw brings together poetic elements, visual structures of comics, and conceptually driven forms in their artist’s zines, books, and spatial books—works that explode and transform aspects of the book into a site. Rooted in firsthand observation, multifaceted research, and an iterative approach, Alex frames familiar moments in reality as worthy of wonder. Brief and tender, quiet and dense, their work invites the reader to slow down and read closely. Reading becomes multimodal and intuitive, while the story itself resists complete unravelling. Throughout their practice, Alex centers the human impulse to seek, expand, and transform how we connect with the everyday, others, and ourselves through storytelling.
Alex has exhibited at numerous comics festivals and art book fairs internationally. Their work is in such collections as the Joan Flasch Artist’s Book Collection, MassArt Zine and Comics Collection, MICA Decker Library, Pratt Institute Artist’s Books Collection, RISD Artist’s Books Collection, Tufts SMFA Library, and Yale University Haas Arts Library Special Collections, among others. They have led workshops and given talks on print- and zine-making at the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art, Chicago; Wende Museum, Culver City; Suffolk University, Boston; and several community art spaces.
Alex is an Assistant Professor of Visual Communication Design at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. They also teach risography at Spudnik Press and design publications for art and culture institutions. They live with many reams of paper and two cats.
contact
︎now / future
Slight Fictions, solo exhibition at De Pree Art Center, Hope College, Holland, MI.past
Comics, Zine, and Art Book Fairs
MICE, Boston; P
ittsburgh Art Book Fair; Detroit Art Book Fair; Pretty Good Fest;
TCAF, Toronto;
Seattle Art Book Fair;
Comic Arts Maine Portland;
Multiple Formats Art Book Fair, Boston;
Boston Art Book Fair; Chicago Art Book Fair; Independent Artist Book Fair, New York;
Jersey Art Book Fair, Jersey City, NJ;
LA Art Book Fair (virtual); Autoptic, Minneapolis; CAKE, Chicago; CALA, LA; CXC, Columbus, OH; DiNK, Denver;
SLICE, St. Louis;
Zineland Terrace, Toronto.Exhibitions (*solo/two-person) There between light and shadow, Chicago Artist Coalition, Chicago*; Pakiramdam, Co-Prosperity, Chicago*; I’m calling from a great distance, The Annex at Spudnik Press, Chicago*; Kitchen Table Stories, Evanston Art Center, Evanston; The Anthropology of Motherhood, Carlow University Art Gallery, Pittsburgh; The Velocity of a Page, Tephra ICA, Tephra, VA; Art of the Risograph, Chicago Design Museum.
Residencies MASS MoCCA (2027); Chicago Artists Coalition HATCH Residency (2023–24); In Cahoots Residency (2022); Spudnik Press Artist Residency (2016–17).