Alex Kostiw is an artist, graphic designer, and educator. Originally born in Sweden, Kostiw grew up in the Bronx before moving to Chicago to get a BA in English Literature from the University of Chicago in 2009. In 2016, Kostiw earned an MFA in Visual Communication Design from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Kostiw is a full-time assistant professor at SAIC, and they’ve been teaching at the school since 2017, when they started as a lecturer. Their love of teaching began when they were a Teaching Assistant for classes during their MFA at SAIC, where they also taught first-year seminars.
Their initial interest in visual communication began with an administrative job doing design work for UChicago after graduating, where they were making posters and announcements for lecture series. “When I graduated from college, we were in a recession, so finding work was difficult, but I did eventually get a job working as an admin assistant in the art history department at UChicago,” Kostiw said.
“Comics just sort of combine everything that I’m interested in,” Kostiw said, describing comics as a natural transition and a blend of all of the elements they were interested in from Visual Communication and storytelling.
Kostiw started making comics after auditing a class at UChicago taught by Alison Bechdel and Hillary Chute.
Many of Kostiw’s interests, and their work’s influences, come from ambiguity or “feelings of in-betweenness,” as they put it. Many of their projects are formed around moments in reality where things feel fantastical, or feelings that suggest something else.
“I am kind of obsessed with this snapshot that I took of a stick on the ground that has a little bit of white paint just at the tip. And when I saw it, I thought that’s a witch’s wand. I’ve made two projects just based off of this snapshot. I can’t seem to help it,” Kostiw said.
Fueled largely by their geologically scattered family, Kostiw is also interested in how people connect with others, specifically across time and space. This ties into their focus on how we feel connected to one another, and the struggle to connect across emotional, psychological, and physical distances.
Kostiw works in the small scale, with both physically small and short-in-length comics. This stems from their poetic approach to comic making, which they find “really difficult to sustain over a much longer project,” and is “something that I am still working on.”
One of their largest projects involved exploring comics as an installation. “Pakiramdam,” which “explored how distances, both actual and metaphorical, render the real as otherworldly,” was installed at Co-Prosperity in the summer of 2021.
Kostiw uses both digital processes and traditional processes, with the process for each individual piece being tied to the necessary effects of that piece.
“I get a little bit fatigued drawing digitally, and sometimes I feel stuck. I think mostly about what is the mode of working that best suits the project?” Kostiw said.
“When we talk about style, people are like, ‘It makes an illustration really recognizable’ or ‘It makes a project really recognizable because of how it looks’. But for me, style is more about the language that I use, the ways that I’m interested in combining text and image rather than how any particular thing might sound or look,” They said.
Kostiw described ‘zine and print art festivals as an opportunity to travel and get to know others despite their introverted tendencies, and the value of those connections that are often difficult to make. They emphasized the importance of others on their work, and art making as a practice, saying, “we’re never making work in a vacuum.”
