About Alex of All Trades

Alexandra Simone Gordon here!  Thank you for becoming a patron. I am a native New Yorker, yet I find myself in St. Louis through a fated combination of "desperation and opportunity".  As a new St. Louis transplant, I am navigating my self-imposed "second life" as an "Alex of All Trades", combining my experience as a former secondary special education teacher, lifelong learner, and consummate theater kid to do my best to experience all that midwest life has to offer (while trying to keep a roof over her head and the lights on).  

Although I have always been enamored with the arts - from playing multiple instruments as a child (ask me about my 2nd grade violin class audit/uprising), performing in dance and theater from age 3 through college, to my passionate lectures on modern art, I never saw myself as an artist; I saw myself as more of a passionate supporter.  That is, until January 2025, when I up-cycled a glass dining room table and realized that my love of artistic expression can also be a means for personal exploration, healing, and transformation.

Currently, I use cut-and-paste collage and mixed media to make meaning and draw new connections between past and present.  By threading fine art, commercial/pop art, and texts of the past as the building blocks of my pieces, my pieces express themes of reflection, transformation, grief, and healing with color, texture, and wit.  Through the process of cutting, ripping, layering, assembling, and glueing, I attempt to build art that represents my developing ethos of life: 

Although we are the sum of our experiences, the conditions of those experiences are shaped and informed by the experiences of those who come before us: We take what we are given, whether it is fractured or whole, black & white or in full technicolor, whole or torn apart, and we have the chance to take those elements to build something beautiful and uniquely ours.  

Thank you for taking the time to support me as an emerging local, outsider artist.  Browse all available pieces at alexofalltrades.myshopify.com. Follow me on Instagram: @alex_ofalltrades or email: alexsimone.gordon@gmail.com for information on new art, events, and more!