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
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.
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).