Alec Soth, Advice for Young Artists, 2024

Between 2022 and 2024, Alec Soth visited twenty-five university arts programs in the United States. Advice for Young Artists includes work made during that time. The title, perhaps like the visits themselves, is misleading: rather than wisdom or guidance, Soth offers an edgy and unresolved reflection on making art at different stages of life and the relationships between photography, time, and aging. The photographs presented here range from formal studies that evoke the classroom to more unregulated works of self-expression. Ambiguous staging, found forms and lyrical portraits are interspersed with gnomic quotations and unfinished beliefs scribbled on post-it notes. Among the students, Soth himself appears at intervals, an uncertain sage in their midst.