Alex Belardo Kostiw’s self-publishing practice, exploring unknown parts and possibilities in our everyday realities. Rooted in visual communication design and printmedia, these works deal in poetic, adapted, and iterative elements, visual structures of comics, and conceptually driven forms. ︎info
books
are
︎ Alex Belardo Kostiw
Alex is an artist, graphic designer, and educator in Chicago. Like dense knots, their stories invite intuitive reading, implying more than they reveal—and resisting full unravelling.Through poetic narratives, imagery often playing on legibility, and layered formats, Alex reframes the familiar. Their storytelling deepens or shifts what the reader may take for granted about realities both personal and shared. Alex’s process often involves capturing, 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 to discover new interpretative meanings in what seems well understood, making space for what may be unknown and unknowable in the everyday, in others, and in ourselves. Alex’s explorations include myth-making, in-betweenness, modes of inter/active reading, and books as installational projects.
Alex teaches design foundations and approaches to narrative in Visual Communication Design at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, as well as printmaking at Spudnik Press, a community print shop. They are also the publishing arm of an art gallery and an independent designer focused on publications, visual identities, and illustrations that center historically marginalized 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.
now / future
2023–24 HATCH ResidencyFall 2024 two-person show, Chicago Artists Coalition
past
Comics, Zine, and Art Book Fairs Boston Art Book Fair; Chicago Art Book Fair; Independent Artist Book Fair, New York; LA Art Book Fair (virtual); Seattle Art Book Fair; Autoptic, Minneapolis; CAKE, Chicago; CALA, LA; CXC, Columbus, OH; DiNK, Denver; MICE, Boston;
SLICE, St. Louis;
TCAF, Toronto; Zineland Terrace, Toronto. Exhibitions (*solo) 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 In Cahoots Residency (2022); Spudnik Press Artist Residency (2016–17).