About the 2024 Organizer Series

The 2024 Organizer Series at Hodges Taylor is programed from proposals submitted as part of an open call for projects. This period marks the beginning of a series designed to showcase innovative organizers who will bring diverse and vibrant programming to our community and space.

Prairie Gallery

Prairie Gallery: Jillian Solotes is a visual artist based in Charlotte. Following a bachelor’s degree in Painting from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in 2014, she spent the past decade self-studying and exploring diverse contemporary artist studios across the world seeking individuals who weave significant narratives through their work. This quest for creative connections led to the formation of Prairie Gallery and Studio — a collective community of emerging and established national and international artists. The project began in 2019 as a way to connect and support one another through collaboration. In 2022, Prairie’s physical gallery and studio opened in Charlotte. In 2023, Jillian’s commitment to community building birthed an artist residency program that offers space for creation and exhibition.

Prairie Gallery is open by appointment only. Stay tuned for additional events and public programming including an open studio with Dan Estabrook and opening reception for Andrea Modica’s solo exhibition, Theatrum Equorum.

Artist In Residence: Dan Estabrook

Open Studio: Friday, March 15 from 6 to 8 PM
Open Studio: Saturday, March 16 from 11 AM to 2 PM

Dan Estabrook was born and raised in Boston, where he studied art at city schools and the Museum of Fine Arts. He discovered photography in his teens through the underground magazines of the punk-rock and skateboarding cultures of the 1980’s. As an undergraduate at Harvard he began studying alternative photographic processes with Christopher James. In 1993, after receiving an MFA from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Dan continued working and teaching in Illinois, Boston, and Florida, eventually settling in Brooklyn, New York.

Dan has continued to make contemporary art using the photographic techniques and processes of the nineteenth century, with forays into sculpture, painting, drawing, and other works on paper. He has exhibited widely and has received several awards, including an Artist’s Fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts in 1994. A documentary on Dan and his work was produced in 2009 for Anthropy Arts’ Photographers Series.

You can see a short film about Dan and his process here, made in conjunction with being a Featured Artist in the 2023 Penland School of Craft Annual Benefit Auction. 2024 will see the publication of a monograph, titled Forever & Never, alongside a large exhibition at the North Carolina Museum of Art.

Andrea Modica ‘Theatrum Equorum’
March 22 to April 15

Opening Reception + Book Signing, March 23 from 6 to 8 PM
First Friday Open Hours: April 5 from 6 to 9 PM

Andrea Modica was born in New York City and lives in Philadelphia, where she works as a photographer and teaches at Drexel University. She is a Guggenheim Fellow, a Fulbright Scholar and the recipient of a Knight Award.

Her books include Treadwell (Chronicle), Minor League (Smithsonian Press), Barbara (Nazraeli), Human Being (Nazraeli), Fountain (Stinehour Editions) and most recently As We Wait (L’Artiere), now in its second edition. Her most recent monograph is a collection of portraits of Mummer Wenches, titled January 1 (L’Artiere). Upcoming is a book of photographs made at a horse clinic in Italy, titled Clinica Equina Bagnarola (Tis Books).

Her photographs have been featured in many magazines, including the New York Times Magazine, the New Yorker, Newsweek and American Photo.

Modica has exhibited extensively and has had solo exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art and the San Diego Museum of Photographic Arts.

Her photographs are part of the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the International Museum of Photography and Film at the George Eastman House, and the Bibliotheque Nationale.

All the photographs on this website and in Andrea Modica’s books are made with an 8X10” camera with Kodak Tri-x film. The final prints are platinum-palladium.