"Elegy (Los Angeles)," 2019
Cynthia Daignault’s “Elegy (Los Angeles),” 2019, has entered the permanent collection of the Dallas Museum of Art, TX. Daignault is a Baltimore-based painter known for an ambitious and wide-ranging practice, exploring the contemporary American experience through a diversity of subjects. “Elegy (Los Angeles)” was included in Daignault’s exhibition “Elegy,” which opened at Night Gallery in September 2019. Of the work, Anna Katherine Brodbeck, the DMA’s Hoffman Family Senior Curator of Contemporary Art, writes, "Cynthia Daignault’s ‘Elegy (Los Angeles)’ is history painting for our time. Although Daignault’s source material is a photograph of the 1992 LA uprising, it still hits a raw nerve, both in terms of the plumes of smoke which call to mind the wildfires that have ravaged the west coast this summer and the country’s continued reckoning with racial injustice. Her distinctive brush strokes are almost at odds with her greyscale palette, animating the supposedly neutral presentation of the news with a pulse of emotion." Daignault’s work is also included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX; and the Baltimore Museum of Art, MD.
Cynthia Daignault (b. 1978, Baltimore, MD) 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. Her work is in numerous public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Art the Blanton Museum of Art and the Baltimore Museum of Art. Daignault is a regularly published author, and her writings have been published in a range of publications. 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 Colony Fellowship. She lives and works in Baltimore, Maryland.