Cady Noland

Cady Noland (born 1956) is an American postmodern conceptual sculptor and an internationally exhibited installation artist whose work deals with the failed Promise of the American Dream and the divide between fame and anonymity, among other themes.

Objectification Process (1989) features a rolled-up flag placed on an orthopedic walker.

Noland's incorporation of walkers, canes, police barricades, and fences work to convey themes of immobility, containment, confinement, and violence.

This Piece Has No Title Yet (1989), one of Noland's best-known works, is a room-sized installation composed of over 1000 six-packs of Budweiser beer stacked behind metal scaffolding.

Curator and dealer Jeffrey Deitch called the work "her masterpiece, her greatest work."

Noland set the record for the highest price ever paid for an artwork by a living woman ($6.6 million) with Oozewald (1989), sold at Sotheby's.

Noland's 1989 red silkscreen on aluminum of Lee Harvey Oswald, Bluewald, sold for $9.8 million at Christie's in May 2015, setting a new auction record for the artist.

Noland, who believes she should have been consulted about this, felt the extensively restored piece was essentially recreated, and was therefore an unauthorized copy of the original, violating her copyright protections as outlined in the Visual Artists Rights Act, a 1990 addition to the US Copyright law.

Her work has been exhibited in museums and expositions including the Whitney Biennial in 1991 and Documenta 9 in Kassel, Germany.

Noland is known for her reluctance to be publicly identified, having only ever allowed one photograph of herself to be publicly released, and for her numerous disputes and lawsuits with museums, galleries, and collectors over their handling of her work.

She attended Sarah Lawrence College and is the daughter of the Color Field painter Kenneth Noland.

Noland's work often explores what she calls "The American Nightmare", aspects of American culture she considers toxic, such as social climbing, glamour, celebrity, violence, and death.

She calls these social constructs a "game."

Noland's work has dealt with themes of restriction, both physical and mental, often using metal to evoke senses of joining or separating.

Noland's work's central theme is fear, both personal and cultural.

Crashed Car was brought about by the fact that she was in a car wreck at a very young age.

In Plane Crash she emphasizes her fear of flying.

The Family and the SLA that kidnapped Hearst is based on her fear of cults.

Her later works have been said to be less aggressive, friendlier to viewers, and more stable and grounded.

Noland's work also studies the American social landscape and depicts America's social identity in fragments.

She also makes sculptures prompted by the theme of humiliation that in part lives in the American consciousness.

It is all in relation to the institution, containment and mobility, and to the American way of life.

Patty Hearst and her grandfather, newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, have both been recurring figures in Noland's work.

Noland has used Patty's story as a kidnapping victim who later joined her kidnappers—the Symbionese Liberation Army—in several high-profile crimes, as well as her grandfather's role as an architect of the contemporary American media landscape, to explore themes of propaganda, brainwashing, and psychopathy.

Noland's arrangement of objects have a casualness that calls into question the status of the art object and its artistic position, and her works are often composed of assembled found objects.

Like those of artists such as Mike Scott and Laurie Parsons, Noland's paintings resist interpretation.

Appropriated by Noland, the role of the press photograph expanded in a post-war country that understood and exported itself through images.

She is known for reframing the photo she appropriates through the materiality of the image itself.

It is then transferred by silkscreen from source to surface.

According to Noland, to reproduce the image is to insert it into a category of knowledge and understanding, one transformed by way of a continuous return.

In her work Not Yet Titled (Bald Manson Girls Sit-In Demonstration) (1993–1994), Noland changes both the image and the text.

It is a wire photo capturing four of the young women from the Manson family kneeling on a sidewalk.

In 2012, Sotheby's removed her aluminum print Cowboys Milking (1990) from a contemporary sale after she "disavowed" the work.

Both Noland and the auction house were later sued by the piece's owner, gallerist Marc Jancou, for $26 million (with $20 million sought from Noland and $6 million from Sotheby's).

A judge dismissed the suit.

In June 2015, the Ohio collector Scott Mueller filed a lawsuit at the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York seeking to reverse his 2014 purchase of Noland's sculpture Log Cabin (1990) for $1.4 million; he claimed that Nolan had "disavowed" the work by not approving the extensive restoration of the piece.

The artist disavowed her sculpture after its sale to Mueller because she believed the work had been restored "beyond recognition."

This restoration occurred after a long-term loan to Suermondt-Ludwig-Museum in Aachen, Germany, where the logs had deteriorated from 10 years of outdoor exposure.

A conservator was consulted and hired to complete the restoration in Germany, where all the decayed wood was replaced by logs obtained from the same Montana source as the originals.

Since the disavowal in 2016, Noland has been involved in complicated legal battles over the restoration of Log Cabin and the application of copyright law to the materials used in her sculpture, German vs. US laws, and her rights to copyright as a living artist.