Cady Noland (born 1956) is an American sculptor, printmaker, and installation artist who primarily works with found objects and appropriated images. Her work, often made with objects denoting danger, industry, and American patriotism, addresses notions including the failed promise of the American Dream, the divide between fame and anonymity, and violence in American society. Many of her works have involved different kinds of physical barriers in gallery spaces, including fences, barricades, and metal poles to guide or restrict the audience's movements. She has drawn extensively on media and tabloid imagery, regularly using images of notable criminals, celebrities, and public figures involved in scandal. Art critic Peter Schjeldahl called Noland "a dark poet of the national unconscious.", quoted in
Noland has participated in several high profile exhibitions, including the 44th Venice Biennale (1990), the Whitney Biennial (1991), and Documenta 9 (1992). After widely exhibiting her art in the 1980s and 1990s to broad acclaim, Noland largely stopped presenting her work for nearly two decades. She began exhibiting again in the late 2010s, staging a museum retrospective in 2018 and exhibitions of new work in the early 2020s. Critics have written extensively about her influence on contemporary art beginning in the 1990s, in particular the seeming visual randomness of her often-sprawling installations that has been broadly emulated by other artists.
She is also known for her numerous disputes and lawsuits with museums, galleries, and collectors over their handling of her work. Noland was the subject of several legal disputes with collectors in the 2010s after she disavowed artworks that she no longer considered genuine due to damage or restoration. On several occasions she has requested the removal of her work from group exhibitions, and she has required art dealers and gallerists to post disclaimers at unauthorized exhibitions to inform audiences that she did not agree to participate. She has also been noted for her reluctance to be publicly identified, having only ever allowed two photographs of herself to be publicly released.
Early life and education Cady Noland was born in 1956 in Washington, D.C., the daughter of Kenneth Noland and Cornelia Langer.
Kenneth was a well-known abstract painter, and Langer, also an artist, co-owned a boutique in Alexandria, Virginia. They divorced in 1957. Her father Kenneth moved to New York City and lived in the Chelsea Hotel before buying a property in Shaftsbury, Vermont, and her mother eventually remarried to Dr. Donald J. Reis in 1985. At the encouragement of art critic Clement Greenberg, her father became an active member of the Sullivanian psychotherapy cult run by Saul B. Newton, which encouraged participants to discard their familial relations; Langer was later photographed for an article in The New York Times about a custody trial related to the cult and was identified with two other women as "relatives of Sullivanian collective members"., quoted in
Author Nick Stillman has written that Noland grew up in New York, but it is unclear when she moved to the city or with which parent she lived; she sometimes spent time as a child at her father's property in Vermont. As an adult she said she "came from" Washington, D.C., calling it "a city of façade" and adding, "What's behind it? We're two-faced!", quoted in She has also said that growing up around her father's practice helped her to understand the machinations of the art world from an early age: "Dealers were already demystified for me."
Noland attended Sarah Lawrence College, Langer's alma mater, and lived in Manhattan after graduation. While in college she studied under sociology professor Stephen N. Butler, whom she would later dedicate a book to.
Life and career 1980-1987: Career beginnings Noland first exhibited her art in 1981 at the nonprofit Washington Square East Galleries in a group exhibition juried by art historian and critic Marcia Tucker. She then began making artworks with found objects in 1983. Among her earliest works was Total Institution (1984), a multimedia assemblage sculpture created with items including a phone receiver, toilet seat, and rubber chicken hanging from a rack on a wall. Noland exhibited several found object artworks at Peter Nagy's gallery Nature Morte in 1987. She presented Shuttle, an assemblage work featuring shiny car parts placed on an extremely old, rusted wheeled cart. The cart was attached to a railing installed on the wall, creating a kind of track that the cart could not escape. Additionally, she exhibited Mirror Device, a small wall-based mirror work featuring a bright orange flare gun and handcuffs hanging from a horizontal metal bar attached to the front of the mirror. Noland met artist Steven Parrino at an opening for an exhibition at the gallery, and the two became friends and colleagues.
Also, in 1987, Noland created a slide lecture titled "Towards a Metalanguage of Evil" which she presented at an academic conference in Atlanta. The lecture explored Noland's research into psychopathology, with a focus on what she saw as the violence and exploitative behaviors of successful American men.
1988-1989: Rise to prominence In 1988, Noland attended an open house for artists at the nonprofit gallery White Columns where she showed Polaroid images of her art to the director of the gallery, Bill Arning. Arning later said the images confused and "fascinated" him, as the installations in the pictures did not seem like traditional artworks, but rather collections of objects: "I couldn't tell where the art was." After visiting Noland's studio, Arning invited her to present her first solo exhibition in a gallery at White Columns. Noland spent so long finalizing the works in the gallery that Arning gave her the keys to lock up when he went home for the night.
Noland's exhibition at White Columns, White Room: Cady Noland, opened in March 1988. Works in the exhibition were made with medical equipment like IV bags and walkers and industrial materials like rubber mats and jumper cables, along with a silk screen depiction of a pistol. She also installed a metal bar across the door, forcing visitors to duck to enter. Journalist Julia Halperin has described the exhibition as "a cross between a Social Security office, a police station and a hospital." Arning said that when he first saw Noland's installation, he immediately called patrons of the gallery to tell them "Look, something really important happened here, and I think you need to see it." Noland's exhibition was critically acclaimed and she was soon invited to participate in several high-profile exhibitions in the United States and internationally. In November 1988, Noland staged her first solo exhibition outside the United States, at Galerie Westersingel 8 in Rotterdam, which featured mixed media mirrored constructions. Noland's exhibition was part of a series of shows by New York-based artists staged in conjunction with Rotterdam's 1988 cultural festival.
Noland exhibited solo at Colin de Land's American Fine Arts Co. gallery in April 1989, presenting multiple works focusing on the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. She silk screened historical images of Lincoln's boots, the suit he was wearing when he was shot, and the bloody cot he died on, along with snippets of text from a minute-by-minute news report of the assassination, onto metal panels that she leaned against the wall. She also exhibited several found object installations, including Our American Cousin, a pen-like metal enclosure in the center of the gallery filled with empty beer cans, stacked walkers, handcuffs, a barbecue grill, license plates, and hamburger buns. The work was titled after the play Lincoln had been viewing the night he was assassinated. Other installations she showed at the exhibition included: Celebrity Trash Spill, a work displayed on the floor in a pile featuring broken cameras, sunglasses, a metallic shirt, rubber floor mats, and a copy of the New York Post with the headline "Abbie Hoffman Dead;" and The American Trip, an assemblage sculpture featuring an American flag paired with a variant of the Jolly Roger. Additionally, Noland used metal bars installed around the space to block access to certain areas, including bars situated around the gallery reception desk, bars blocking the entry to the gallery owner's office, and bars surrounding the owner's desk. Reviewing the exhibition for Arts Magazine, critic Gretchen Faust called Our American Cousin the "centerpiece" of the show, adding that the piece "capture[s] the flavor, really the essence, of a Chevy truck commercial." Critic Jan Avgikos described Our American Cousin as a "whitetrash déjeuner sur l'herbe." Multiple critics identified chromed or shiny metal as a central visual motif in Noland's work.
In October 1989, Noland staged a solo exhibition at the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh, where she installed This Piece Has No Title Yet. One of Noland's best-known works, the piece is a room-sized installation composed of over 1000 six-packs of Budweiser beer stacked behind metal scaffolding with American flags, handcuffs, and other detritus scattered around the room. The museum borrowed the beer from a local distributor and had to dismantle and rebuild the installation three times over the course of the show to return the beer so it could be sold before it expired. Noland said that Budweiser cans "serve as a kind of 'flag '" in her art because of their similarity in color to American flags, and she described the cans as "tiny units of mastery" for their visual representation of mass production, commodification, and consumption., quoted in John Caldwell, a curator at the Carnegie Museum of Art, called the work "jaw-dropping" and tried unsuccessfully to convince local collectors in Pittsburgh to buy it. It was instead purchased by New York-based collector Elaine Dannheisser. Curator and dealer Jeffrey Deitch later called the work Noland's "masterpiece, her greatest work."
Noland then mounted a solo show at Galleria Massimo De Carlo in Milan, in December 1989, where she almost completely filled the gallery with objects strewn across the floor and installed on the walls – including beer cans, walkers, bungee cords, metal clips, a flipper and snorkel, a revolver, flags, potato chips, and a gas mask. The largest work in the show, Deep Social Space, consisted of beer cans, an American flag, saddles and horse blankets, a barbecue grill, a rural USPS mailbox, a crutch, dish towels and an apron, hamburger buns, and containers of motor oil and Quaker oats, among other objects, all stacked and arranged among and between two parallel sets of metal bars and barriers. She also installed a large number of silk screened works, many of which comprised metal panels with media images and reports from the life and travails of kidnapping victim and heiress Patty Hearst, including pictures of Hearst in a cheerleading uniform, Hearst on a hunting trip with her boyfriend, and Hearst wielding a gun with members of the Symbionese Liberation Army. Noland also debuted Oozewald, a silk screened metal cut-out work featuring an image of Lee Harvey Oswald – John F. Kennedy's assassin – being assassinated himself; Noland cut several circular holes in the cut-out, including one over Oswald's mouth, into which she stuffed an American flag. In addition, Noland again installed metal bars and gates throughout the gallery which forced viewers to follow certain paths and blocked them from entering spaces.