Advice For Young Artist - Alec Soth

Between 2022 and 2024, Alec Soth visited 25 undergraduate art programs across the U.S., creating a thought-provoking body of work titled "Advice for Young Artists." Despite its instructional title, the project resists straightforward guidance. Instead, Soth explores themes of artmaking, personal growth, and the passage of time through photography.

The collection includes formal classroom-inspired studies, raw self-expressions, and ambiguous staged scenes. Interwoven with lyrical portraits and found objects are cryptic Post-it notes featuring unfinished credos and enigmatic quotes. Soth himself occasionally appears, an introspective presence grappling with aging and artistic legacy.

Inspired by Walker Evans’s late Polaroids, this project marks a reflective expansion of Soth's artistic practice, two decades after his first publication. Echoing the conceptual approach of "Broken Manual," it uses the guise of instruction to spark introspection and provoke deeper questions about the artistic journey at all stages of life.