ALEX KOSTIW

The first in an on-going series of bookmark-shaped books on seemingly aimless notions, “A Name” is a brief, personal reflection on what it might mean to make a person. With images that allude to Greek mythology, Penelope, “the name without a girl,” stands in for a latent wish to have a daughter.

Alex Kostiw is an artist, graphic designer, and educator based in Chicago, IL. She makes books and works on paper that explore liminal spaces in communication—gaps where intention and imagination meet. Rooted in design, printmaking, and literary criticism, her works experiment with poetic and reimagined text and image, visual structures of comics, and conceptually driven forms. Through loose narratives and imagery, they gesture toward the human impulse for storytelling as a means to understand reality, relationships, and ourselves.

Alex's work has been in expos internationally and is collected in the Joan Flasch Artist’s Book Collection, the Chicago Zine Collection at the University of Chicago Library, the Zine and Comics Collection at the MassArt Library, the Decker Library at MICA, and the National Museum of Women in the Arts, among others. She holds a BA in English literature from the University of Chicago and MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she teaches visual communication design.