Cynthia Daignault b. 1978
"Daignault's paintings hold onto a consciousness of depletion. She seems to state: we've lost so much, what do we have that is worth hanging on to?"—Leila Grothe
Cynthia Daignault investigates concepts of monument, memory, and the natural world in a contemporary response to the genre of history painting. For Daignault, painting is a means to slow the ceaseless flow of time, to meditate on what to memorialize and remember, and, to capture, according to the artist, “what it means to be alive at a specific moment in time.”
Daignault approaches history painting as an act of poetry. In this, her sensibility recalls the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, who engaged with political history through the creation of quiet, specific and powerful metaphors. Daignault's paintings are often installed in series, a prominent example of which includes Light Atlas (2016), a collection of 360 paintings from the artist's travels across the continental U.S., and Twenty-Six Seconds (2024) which references the 8mm silent Zapruder film that captured the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. For these works, among others, Daignault creates interrelated groupings of canvases, infused with a cinematic sense of narrative unfolding over time.
Throughout her practice, Daignault draws parallels between environmental settings and the mechanical act of seeing, questioning how we perceive, organize, and ultimately consume nature in a world shaped by data and digital imagery. In a 2025 series, Daignault depicts forests distorted by equirectangular projection, a mapping technique that translates three-dimensional shapes into two-dimensional images, used to create maps of the globe, stills from virtual reality environments, and 360 degree cameras. Critic Jarrett Earnest has identified Daignault’s impressionistic style as distinguishing painterliness from the mechanisms of media production: “broad luscious strokes emphasize how the work is not the result of a photomechanical process but handmade, an act that aggregates and condenses time.”
Cynthia Daignault received a BA in Art and Art History from Stanford University. The first major monograph on her work, Light Atlas, was published in 2019. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including a 2019 Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, a 2016 Foundation for the Contemporary Arts Award, a 2011 Rema Hort Foundation Award, and a 2010 MacDowell Artist Fellowship. She lives and works in Baltimore, Maryland.
Museum Exhibitions & Collections
Daignault's work has been featured in recent institutional exhibitions including The Living End: Painting and Other Technologies, 1970-2020 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, IL; Ordinary People: Photorealism and the Work of Art since 1968 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; and Soft Water Hard Stone, the 2021 New Museum Triennial, NY. In 2026, Daignault will present her first solo institutional exhibition at ICA Boston, MA.
Daignault's work is in numerous public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Walker Art Center, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Blanton Museum of Art. She has presented solo exhibitions and projects at many major museums and galleries, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, MASS MoCA, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and White Columns.