Cynthia Connolly

Cynthia Connolly
Born	1964 Los Angeles, California, United States
Nationality	American
Known for	photography, letterpress printing, art

Cynthia Connolly (born 1964) is an American photographer, graphic designer, and artist. She graduated from Corcoran College of Art and Design and worked for Dischord Records and d.c. space. In 1988 she published Banned in DC: Photos and Anecdotes From the DC Punk Underground (79–85) through her small press Sun Dog Propaganda. The book was compiled with Sharon Cheslow and Leslie Clague, and it documented the early hardcore punk scene in Washington, DC which included such bands as Bad Brains and Minor Threat.

Since the mid-1990s, she has exhibited her photography of musicians, landscapes, and found objects. Cynthia traveled the world arranging her exhibits in art galleries, and ad hoc art spaces such as abandoned warehouses, squats, bars, peoples apartments and homes, etc. and self promoted her own work by letterpressing her own promotional posters and postcards. While traveling with her exhibits, she would sell her self-published postcards and books. Her photographic work, postcards and books were exhibited in Beautiful Losers which toured in the United States and Europe from 2004–2009 and was reviewed in Art in America in January 2005. In 2002 she became a participant of the Rural Studio Program of Auburn University, Newbern, Alabama where she won a National Endowment for the Arts Grant with the Alabama State Council on the Arts to build a vegetable stand utilizing an art medium called "hogwire" by Alabama folk artist, Butch Anthony, as gates for the stand, and incorporating art by other Alabama artists in the project. She published her photographs in The Rural Studio Bonus Album and exhibited her extensive collection of photographic work from Alabama in four main solo exhibitions as well as other group shows in subsequent years. Her photography is also in Lee Ranaldo's book Lengths and Breaths as well as many others mentioned below.

More recently, in 2012 Connolly started an ongoing series titled "Letters on Top of Buildings", where she attempts to recapture the Hollywood signs that inspired her artwork in her younger years. In this series, she includes photos from places across the nation, most of them from Virginia and Washington, D.C., with only a couple from L.A. This series was shown in the J. Paul Getty Museum after the Corcoran Gallery of Art had "fallen apart" and the works were returned back to her. She then thought she could go big and "try the Getty", with much success.

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