Cady Noland, an Art World Recluse, Has Officially Come Back into the Fray

Even just five years ago, it was unthinkable to imagine a sizable Cady Noland exhibition ever opening during her lifetime in the US, the country whose damaged national identity she has so incisively explored since the late 1980s. Her ramshackle installations composed of American flags, tossed-out Budweiser cans, and car parts have earned plenty of admirers and institutional cachet, but that appears to have mattered none to Noland, who at the time seemed to have essentially stopped showing new work sometime around 2000.

Not long before the pandemic, she seemed to have gone silent altogether—no one knew for sure whether she still producing art, or if she had plans to exhibit any of it, if it did exist. There was even a rumor that she declined the opportunity to have a Museum of Modern Art retrospective.

But now, after having a retrospective in Germany in 2018, Noland has done the most surprising thing yet: she’s begun saying yes to powerful people who come knocking at her door, offering to exhibit her art.

Last year, Gagosian, the biggest gallery in the world, showed her art at one its New York spaces, and earlier this year, the gallery also featured her art in its Art Basel booth. And now, Noland is having yet another solo exhibition, this one at Glenstone, the luxe private museum of collectors Emily and Mitchell Rales just outside Washington, D.C. (Fear not, Noland fans: the show was “developed in collaboration with the artist,” per its press release—a genteel way of saying that she provided Glenstone with her blessing, which Noland has not always been so willing to do. A museum spokesperson told me that Noland was present during installation.)

Glenstone’s exhibition is billed as Noland’s first US survey, though that may be overselling it. The 25 or so works on view, nearly all of them from the museum’s own collection, cannot provide as comprehensive a picture of her oeuvre as did her 2018 retrospective at the MMK Frankfurt. Still, this is a show whose very existence is in some ways more significant than its contents. It suggests that Noland, formerly one of the art world’s most elusive characters, has officially come back into the fray.

Does that blunt her spiky critique of a distinctly American obsession with consumerism, violence, crime, and punishment? Part of the charm of Noland’s art is that it is so unknowable—it seems legible until one thinks about all the bizarre choices she has made. Images from the media, like the famed photograph of San Francisco heiress Patty Hearst wielding an assault rifle, recur regularly in her sculptures. But rather than simply re-presenting those images, a common strategy used by other artists during the 1980s, the era when she first became famous, Noland casts her appropriated pictures alongside spare automobile parts and fencing. In the case of CLIP-ON MAN (1989), one of the oldest works in the Glenstone show, Noland places a blown-up black-and-white picture of a soused, smiling man beside aluminum tubing. What’s the picture got to do with this metal armature? Noland leaves those associations vague.  

Sculptures like the Patty Hearst ones are harsh, wall-eyed sculptures. They are seemingly disaffected, despite their allusions to torture, exploitation, and suffering—not exactly subjects to be taken up glibly. One might think that the more of her art there is, the less potent it becomes.

Not so, as the Glenstone show proves. Her forbidding art of the late ’80s and ’90s remains every bit as wacky and upsetting today.

Tower of Terror (1993–94), arguably the show’s crown jewel, is placed front and center in one gallery. It consists of an aluminum pillory facing a bench that, if encountered from a certain angle, may seem to invite potential sitters to enjoy a moment of rest within the gallery. But the bench is simply too tall to plop down upon, and anyway, if you did choose to sit here, you might also find yourself wanting to stick your arms and head through the holes of a device made for public humiliation. Even the natural lighting that pours into Glenstone can’t defang this work.

Should there be any doubt that Tower of Terror is secretly a work about America, many of the pieces surrounding it invoke the stars and stripes. Noland once termed her approach “flag manqué,” a reference to the way she drains this national symbol of any sense of promise, as she does in her famed 1989 sculpture Oozewald. Here, she has awkwardly silkscreened a grainy, edited photograph of Lee Harvey Oswald’s assassination onto aluminum, punching holes through this shiny sheet and stuffing a flag through an opening near Oswald’s mouth, as if to gag him. There’s plenty of brutality on display, not just in the photograph itself, but also Noland’s savagery toward it, which seems to intentionally channel a zest for bloodshed that runs deep in this country.

Not even a walk along Glenstone’s serene, leaf-strewn woodland trail could vanquish Oozewald from my memory. Surely, this is the effect Glenstone had intended: the museum opened the show in October, putting the Presidential election and its aftermath squarely within the exhibition’s run. The show is meant to disturb, to remind viewers of the frailty of the American Dream and the instability of democracy. Purposefully or not, the exhibition feels like a harbinger of things to come.

The sentiment would be cloying or obvious for just about any other artist, but Noland’s work is more complex than meets the eye. She seeds her work with sneaky hints about her quest for total control, which can be seen as analogous, perhaps, for what politicians and corporations really desire. (For example: as Greg Allen has pointed out, Oozewald’s stand is itself copyrighted by the artist, a gesture that mimics how a company might license a new product.) Noland’s devotees scour her art for clues about what she’s really up to, and her Glenstone show is likely to send her fans burrowing even further down the rabbit hole, since it is the rare exhibition that contains a lot of her significant work in one place.

Much of the investigating will take place in the exhibition’s gallery restaging Noland’s 2023 Gagosian show of new work, which Glenstone reportedly bought out. Here, once again, are crumpled beer cans encased in glass cubes, tiny replicas of coins and horses, sleek tables, locked shelving units. More of the same, it seems.

Yet there is also a stack of black plastic pallets, all branded with the Rehrig Pacific Company’s logo. Each is stamped with a warning to its viewer: “Unauthorized possession of this pallet is a violation of state law.” Noland has come to possess them—which could not have been easy, considering that one can’t just purchase them online with the click of a button—and has now made them her own. Her appropriation of the pallets is a means of showing Rehrig who’s boss.

I started to feel as though Noland had shown me who was boss, too. I realized the pallets did not appear at Gagosian, and as I walked through the Glenstone gallery reconstructing that show, I noticed a few more objects I didn’t recall having ever seen. There was a tray with a bookend, a gasoline pump, a leash, and what appeared to be a boxing mask. There was also what seemed to be an aluminum cast of a box, its surface bearing a note that this object was protected by the Pinkerton private eye firm, as well as a metal platform containing a sticker with an Amazon.com barcode and the date of its production—March 4, 2024, to be exact, more than two months after the most recent work listed in the press materials provided to me in October. Neither these objects nor the pallets appeared on the Glenstone show’s checklist. It felt as though my memory, or perhaps Noland herself, were playing tricks on me.

The pallets, Glenstone told me, were a newly added “element” complementing the Gagosian works. The box, meanwhile, was an untitled work from 2024 that Noland had put “on loan” to Glenstone. The museum promised to add the piece to the checklist, dodging my question about whether its omission was intentional. It felt to me as though Noland were pulling strings from behind the scenes, forcing institutions to bend to her will. She still had her edge.