Cady Noland

Cady Noland was born in 1956 in Washington, D.C., the daughter of Color Field painter Kenneth Noland and artist Cornelia Langer. She earned a BA from Sarah Lawrence College and has long been based in New York City, where she continues to live and work. Represented by Gagosian in both New York and London, she stands as one of the most consequential American artists to emerge from the late 1980s, her practice built around a sustained, unflinching examination of violence, spectacle, national mythology, and the mechanisms by which American society regulates and confines bodies.

Noland's earliest solo exhibition, at White Columns in New York in 1988, announced a practice that would prove immediately distinctive. Working with industrial materials, found objects, and mass-media imagery, she constructed a visual language in which the familiar surfaces of American life — playground equipment, barbecue debris, celebrity photographs — become sites of latent or explicit brutality. Works from 1989 define this breakthrough period with particular force: Oozewald, a silkscreened aluminum cutout depicting Lee Harvey Oswald, fuses political assassination with the flat grammar of mass reproduction; Our American Cousin, a tableau evoking the wreckage of an abandoned family gathering, transforms the iconography of domestic leisure into an emblem of social collapse; The Big Slide draws on the architecture of public recreation to probe questions of bodily control; and This Piece Has No Title Yet withholds even the stabilizing gesture of naming, implicating the viewer in the instability of meaning itself. Into the mid-1990s, monumental works such as Tower of Terror (1993–94) and Publyck Sculpture (1994) extended these concerns to an architectural scale, placing prison and playground structures in deliberate, unsettling proximity.

Noland's work is held in the collections of Glenstone in Potomac, Museum Brandhorst in Munich, and The Broad in Los Angeles. Glenstone mounted the first major U.S. museum survey of her career, presenting sculptures spanning from the late 1980s onward, including Our American Cousin. Her exhibition history across recent years reflects sustained institutional and critical engagement: solo presentations at Gagosian New York in 2023 and 2025, a solo at Galerie Buchholz in New York in 2021 titled THE CLIP-ON METHOD, and group exhibitions including American Pastoral at Gagosian London in 2020 and Haunted Realism at Gagosian London in 2022. Forthcoming presentations include a solo at Gagosian New York opening in September 2025, a major exhibition at Museum Brandhorst running from October 2025 through September 2026, and a solo at Gagosian Davies Street, London, in 2026. Critical attention to her work has appeared in publications including Frieze, Art in America, and The New York Times, with recent writing continuing to interrogate the enduring, discomfiting relevance of her analysis of American culture.