Andrea Modica: Italian Story brings two bodies of work to two New York venues, linking questions of womanhood, identity and cultural inheritance. On view from September 12, 2026, through February 13, 2027, the exhibition at Alice Austen House in Staten Island presents 39 platinum prints made during Modica’s travels across Italy, while a related presentation at AMR Art DUMBO focuses on her earlier series Catholic Girl.
Modica’s relationship with Italy began in the mid-1980s and grew from her Italian American upbringing. Returning to the country associated with her family history, she photographed its people, landscapes, interiors, rituals and ordinary streets. The resulting images do not attempt to define Italy through postcard familiarity. They follow the quieter process of recognition, in which a place becomes personal through repeated encounters, remembered stories and details that resist explanation.
Printed by hand in platinum, the photographs have a distinctive physical presence. Their silvery tones hold faces, walls, fields and domestic spaces with equal care, allowing atmosphere to emerge gradually. Andrea Modica works primarily with an 8x10 camera and traditional processes, practices that encourage patience and close attention. Her pictures feel intimate without being intrusive, shaped by a sustained relationship with the people and places before her.
At AMR Art DUMBO, Catholic Girl presents 19 photographs from 1984, made in all-girls Catholic high schools in South Brooklyn and New Haven. The young women appear in moments of friendship, uncertainty, humor and self-invention, negotiating adolescence within the rules and rituals of Catholic education. Seen alongside Italian Story, the series reveals how identity forms through both personal desire and inherited structures.
The two exhibitions create a conversation across generations, geographies and institutions committed to expanding the visibility of women artists. Modica’s photographs connect the private and the historical without forcing either into a single narrative. At Alice Austen House and AMR Art DUMBO, her work makes memory tangible through faces, gestures, rooms and landscapes that remain open to interpretation.
Image: Radnor, 2023. © Andrea Modica
Instagram 
Facebook 
Pinterest 
X / Twitter 