Advice for Young Artists

By Alec Soth

Between 2022 and 2024, Alec Soth visited twenty-five undergraduate art programs across the United States, creating a body of work titled Advice for Young Artists. Contrary to its title, the work offers an unresolved reflection on artmaking, photography, time, and ageing, featuring a mix of formal studies, self-expressive works, ambiguous stagings, and lyrical portraits, interspersed with gnomic quotes and unfinished credos. Inspired by Walker Evans’s late Polaroids, this collection marks a new expansion of Soth’s practice, using an instructional format as a cover for introspection and provocation, and serves as both a study of young artists and a personal reckoning with ageing.

2024, hardcover; 10.5 x 10.75 inches; 72 pages, ISBN: 9781915743763.