Alex Kostiw is an artist, graphic designer, and educator. Rooted in printmaking, design, and literary criticism, her storytelling pulls together a variety of structures and materials: rhythmic, gestural aspects of comics, such as panel transitions, simple iconography, and special relationships of word and picture; poetic, iterative, and adapted writing and images; and conceptually driven forms that shape the reading experience. The resulting narratives are figurative, often non-linear studies of the role of language in how we understand the self, its hidden parts and possibilities, and its connections to reality and to other people. Influenced in part by her biracial identity and her family’s stories, her interests lie in the connective gaps between disparate events, between gesture and understanding, and between experience and fiction. For Alex, reading is an act of inhabiting liminal spaces; her work invites the reader to intuit a whole from disjointed visual and textual pieces. By reading, the reader completes a story, even as the same story seems to offer multiple possibilities in interpretation.
Alex holds a BA in English Literature from the University of Chicago and an MFA in Visual Communication Design from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has exhibited in comics expos and art book fairs nationwide, and her work is in comics and zine collections at several institutions, including the Joan Flasch Artist’s Book Collection, the University of Chicago Library, the MassArt Library, the Decker Library at MICA, and the Library of Congress. Alex was born in Sweden, raised in the Bronx, and currently lives and works in Chicago.
