Alex Belardo Kostiw’s self-publishing practice, exploring unknown parts and possibilities in our everyday realities. 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.
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.
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...
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.
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?
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.
Hibernus
10 pages, one sheet folded, risograph, 4.25 x 2.75 inches
This comic began during a phone call with my cousin, when I doodled a bear’s face in my notebook. My cousin thought it was strange, the bear’s floating head, but I figured it was dreaming.
I opened one of its eyes. The bear started remembering its body. My cousin said it looked very cozy. I erased and redrew it standing in front of a panel, which might have been its dream or waking reality. The bear moved toward the full-flowing stream. Still sleepy, my cousin surmised.
The one-sheet format offers a vast snow-white space and kept me from making the quiet sequence needlessly elaborate.
This comic began during a phone call with my cousin, when I doodled a bear’s face in my notebook. My cousin thought it was strange, the bear’s floating head, but I figured it was dreaming.
I opened one of its eyes. The bear started remembering its body. My cousin said it looked very cozy. I erased and redrew it standing in front of a panel, which might have been its dream or waking reality. The bear moved toward the full-flowing stream. Still sleepy, my cousin surmised.
The one-sheet format offers a vast snow-white space and kept me from making the quiet sequence needlessly elaborate.
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.
the same heart
8 pages, one sheet folded, risograph, 4.25 x 2.75 inches
Sometimes, a family is less like a tree and more like a cadena de amor. This book is a letter to my roots and vines.
books
are
︎ Alex Belardo Kostiw
Alex is an artist, graphic designer, and educator in Chicago making comics at the intersection of design and poetry. Their work frames moments when the everyday becomes nebulous; people seek connection across time and space; and the self feels like a stranger. It invites intuitive, multifaceted reading—even as it resists full unravelling.
Alex’s process often involves fragmenting, reframing, and/or combining different perspectives on everyday phenomena, such as reimagining birds as stories based on their names, or creating a sense of place by juxtaposing drawings from memory with old photographs. Through their practice, they guide readers toward fluid meanings in what seems fixed, making space for the familiar to become unknown and unknowable. Alex’s explorations include myth-making, in-betweenness, modes of inter/active reading, and books as installational projects.
Alex is an assistant professor in Visual Communication Design at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. They also teach printmaking at Spudnik Press, a community print shop, and design publications for institutions that center historically underrepresented voices in art and culture.
Alex holds an MFA in Visual Communication Design from SAIC and a BA in English Literature from the University of Chicago. They live with many reams of paper and two cats.
contact
︎now / future
Pittsburgh Art Book Fair; solo exhibition, De Pree Art Center.past
Comics, Zine, and Art Book Fairs Boston Art Book Fair; Chicago Art Book Fair; Comic Arts Maine Portland; Independent Artist Book Fair, New York; Multiple Formats Art Book Fair, Boston; LA Art Book Fair (virtual); Seattle Art Book Fair; Autoptic, Minneapolis; CAKE, Chicago; CALA, LA; CXC, Columbus, OH; DiNK, Denver; Jersey Art Book Fair, Jersey City, NJ; MICE, Boston;
SLICE, St. Louis;
TCAF, Toronto; Zineland Terrace, Toronto. Exhibitions (*solo/two-person) Chicago Artist Coalition*, Chicago; Co-Prosperity, Chicago*; The Annex at Spudnik Press, Chicago*; Evanston Art Center, Evanston; Carlow University Art Gallery, Pittsburgh; Tephra ICA, Tephra, VA; Chicago Design Museum.
Residencies Chicago Artists Coalition HATCH Residency (2023–24); In Cahoots Residency (2022); Spudnik Press Artist Residency (2016–17).