Cynthia Daignault: Light Atlas

September 20, 2025 – February 8, 2026

In 2014, artist Cynthia Daignault (b. 1978, Baltimore, MD) traveled around the entire outside border of the United States, stopping roughly every twenty-five miles to paint the view before her. She spent roughly nine months alone in her Dodge Ram pickup on back roads and smaller highways to drive the perimeter of the US, pulling over to sketch and photograph the view out her window. After the journey, she returned to her Los Angeles studio to translate her drawings and photographs into finished oil paintings. The resulting work, Light Atlas (2014–2017), is a monumental portrait of the land she encountered in 360 canvases, one that reveals slow shifts in weather patterns; atmosphere; economy; and the impact of development on the land.

Like her past projects—she has painted the sky every day for a year, an outdoor clock at every hour, and the same view of trees for forty days and nights, Daignault makes a vibrant case for painting as means of documentation at a moment when photographs are in endless supply. A portrait of a moment in time and a calendar of memory, Light Atlas (2014–2017) is as much about what has been left out as what is there. The 360 canvases echo the 360 degrees of a circle, offering us a poignant way to understand the unit of measurement by which we measure our life.

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Cynthia Daignault: Denali

February 19 – March 28, 2026

Opening Thursday, February 19, 6–8pm

509 West 27th Street, New York

Olney Gleason is pleased to present Denali, an exhibition of new works by Cynthia Daignault (b. 1978).

Daignault is an artist celebrated for using painting to explore the contemporary condition. With emotive brushwork and radiant color, she explores a range of topics spanning history, culture, politics, and art. Denali sees Daignault return to the theme of landscape, for which she is perhaps best known, expanding on ideas from earlier series, including Light Atlas (2014), Elegy (2019), and As I Lay Dying (2021). This exhibition anticipates several upcoming institutional presentations: Daignault’s iconic landscape work Light Atlas will go on view at Thomas Cole National Historic Site in Catskill, NY, from June 20 to November 1, 2026, and ICA Boston will present a major solo museum exhibition, debuting a new monumental work on the Valley of Yosemite, from August 27, 2026, to January 18, 2027.

For her latest exhibition, Daignault takes a single subject, Denali, and deconstructs the Alaskan mountain across hundreds of canvases. Denali, meaning ‘The Great One’, is the highest peak in North America and a contested symbol of American exceptionalism, white supremacy, and frontier mythology. The mountain also stands as a grand reminder to the existential threat of climate change, a theme which weaves throughout the show. As Arctic regions are warming at a rate four times faster than the global average, the mountain is simultaneously a symbol of our country's majestic wilderness and of its impending collapse. The exhibition features eleven new paintings, including the artist’s latest monumental work: a 300-panel, 24-foot-long portrait of Denali, which explores this binary between beauty and loss. 

Daignault paints in the post-digital world, echoing the hyper-mediated experience of contemporary life by referencing digital photography, social media, augmented reality, and internet image arrays. All the works in this show are multipartite, engaging the digital syntaxes of clone, dupe, copy, paste, glitch, crop, and delete. Daignault’s refusal to present a single scene stands in poignant contrast to the canon of American landscape painting born from the Hudson River School. Instead, Daignault posits an expansive version of reality, where representation unfolds serially across time and space, rather than in one single sublime moment. Painting becomes a means to organize and slow the ceaseless flow of images and time, to meditate on acts of memorial and remembrance, and to capture, according to the artist, “what it means to be alive at this specific moment in time.”

https://thomascole.org

Baltimore-based artist Cynthia Daignault (b. 1978 in Baltimore) conceives of her work as “long-form painting.” She creates interrelated groupings of impressionistic canvases that are infused with a cinematic sense of narrative unfolding over time. Daignault disassembles the monumental scale of traditional history painting in her intimate, episodic paintings, which often center on the idea that the American landscape is a witness to history. Throughout, painting is a means to slow down 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.” For the ICA, Daignault is creating a monumental, multi-panel installation of an iconic image of the American landscape: the view looking up the Merced River through the sheer granite valley to the sky beyond at Yosemite National Park. Daignault returns to this vista—well-known first through the nineteenth century photographs of Carlton Watkins and paintings of Albert Bierstadt—through the “mediated consciousness” of digital images, to meditate on our urgent and evolving relationship with the American landscape.

https://www.icaboston.org/exhibitions/cynthia-daignault/