BOOK LAUNCH AND PERFORMANCE 
L I G H T  A T L A S 
BY CYNTHIA DAIGNAULT 

Wednesday / October 30 / 6pm
Performance at 6:30pm

White Columns and Gregory R. Miller & Co. are excited to announce the official book release of Cynthia Daignault’s first monograph, Light Atlas, published in 2019. A reception will be held at White Columns on Wednesday, October 30th, 2019, from 6–8pm, with a performance by the artist at 6:30pm. Drinks will be served.  

In 2014, Daignault traveled around the entire outside border of the USA, stopping roughly every 25 miles to paint the view before her. The resulting monumental work, Light Atlas, is a grand portrait of America in 360 canvases that reveal slow shifts in hue, atmosphere, depth, industry, and economy. This book reproduces every painting of Light Atlas at 1:1 scale, in a filmic retelling of her journey and the country she circled. New texts were commissioned for the book by celebrated historians and writers Alexander Nemerov and David Campany, whose essays discuss Light Atlas in its relationship to both the history of painting and photography.  While making Light Atlas, Daignault concurrently produced a series of never-before-seen painted postcards with original texts about the American scenes she encountered. On the occasion of the book release, Daignault will perform a reading and screening of these postcards for the first time ever. Copies of the monograph will be available for sale at the event and Daignault will sign copies of the book.  

Cynthia Daignault (b. Baltimore, MD) had a solo exhibition at White Columns in 2011. Daignault received a BA in Art and Art History from Stanford University. 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, and the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Her work is in numerous public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Blanton Museum of Art, and the Baltimore Museum of Art. Daignault is also an 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 Mann Foundation Award, and a 2010 MacDowell Colony Fellowship. She lives and works in Baltimore.