Visiting Artists Series: Cynthia Daignault

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AU's Studio Art MFA program presents an artist talk with Cynthia Daignault in Katzen 201.

Cynthia Daignault investigates concepts of monument, memory, and the shifting experience of the natural world in a contemporary response to the genre of history painting. For Daignault, landscape is witness. Throughout her practice, she draws parallels between the environmental setting and the mechanical act of seeing. This investigation into optics acts as a metaphor for the polarities at the heart of American life and the reverberations of historical trauma.

Daignault received her degree from Stanford University. She has presented solo exhibitions and projects at many major museums and galleries, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New Museum of Contemporary 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. Her work is in numerous public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Walker Center for Art, and the Baltimore Museum of Art. Daignault is a regularly published author, and editor of numerous publications. The first major monograph on her work, Light Atlas, was published in 2019, and a new paperback edition will be released in early 2024. 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. In 2024, she will present a new monumental commission at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art.