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
Between Us
12 pages, staple-bound, laser, 6.5 x 4.5 inches
When two share a vision, how do they know they see the same thing? A strange occurrence will draw a couple closer together, or pull them apart.
A version of this story appeared in the anthology Linequality.
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
MICE (Massachusetts Independent Comics Expo) at Boston University; Slight Fictions, solo exhibition at De Pree Art Center, Hope College, Holland, MI.past
Comics, Zine, and Art Book Fairs Pittsburgh 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; MICE, Boston;
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 Chicago Artists Coalition HATCH Residency (2023–24); In Cahoots Residency (2022); Spudnik Press Artist Residency (2016–17).