Image: Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston
Cynthia Daignault’s ‘Valley’ is now on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, presenting a monumental, multi-panel installation based on the view up the Merced River through Yosemite National Park. The exhibition, on display in the Paul and Catherine Buttenwieser Gallery, runs from August 27, 2026, through January 18, 2027.
The Baltimore-based artist, born in 1978, describes her practice as “long-form painting,” a process built around interrelated groups of canvases and a sense of narrative unfolding over time. At the ICA, that approach is applied to a landscape image associated with both American art history and the circulation of contemporary digital imagery: the sheer granite valley, river and sky at Yosemite.
According to the museum, Daignault returns to the vista through what it calls the “mediated consciousness” of digital images. The work considers how encounters with the American landscape are shaped by images that are reproduced, transmitted and viewed through screens, while also reflecting on the landscape’s role as a witness to history. The installation is described as a new work and has not previously been seen.
Daignault’s broader method treats painting as a way to slow the movement of time and to consider what should be remembered or memorialized. Her intimate, episodic paintings also break down the monumental scale traditionally associated with history painting. ‘Valley’ extends that tension: it takes a vast and culturally familiar subject and reconstructs it through a contemporary, multi-panel format.
The Yosemite view has earlier precedents in the 19th-century photographs of Carleton Watkins and the paintings of Albert Bierstadt. The ICA’s presentation places Daignault’s installation in relation to those earlier representations without treating the landscape as a fixed or neutral subject. Instead, the exhibition frames the image as part of an evolving history of how the American landscape has been pictured and experienced.
‘Valley’ is organized by Jeffrey De Blois, Mannion Family Curator, with Meghan Clare Considine, Curatorial Assistant. Considine will lead a gallery talk on the exhibition on October 18 at 2 p.m., discussing the new installation and Daignault’s long-form painting practice. The talk is free with museum admission.
The exhibition is part of the programme of the ICA/Boston, an institution founded in 1936 as the Boston Museum of Modern Art. It adopted the name Institute of Contemporary Art in 1948 and opened its current waterfront museum building, designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, in 2006. ‘Cynthia Daignault: Valley’ remains on view in Boston through January 18, 2027.
