Cady Noland’s Dioramas of Cruelty
At Glenstone Museum, Potomac, the artist identifies violence at the core of American society – and risks reinscribing it
At Glenstone Museum, Potomac, the artist identifies violence at the core of American society – and risks reinscribing it

In 1987, artist Cady Noland delivered a lecture entitled ‘Towards a Metalanguage of Evil’, which theorized that psychopathy is at the heart of American society, wherein success is gained through violence and manipulation. Oft quoted by scholars and critics reviewing her work, this lecture is regarded as the key to parsing an oeuvre of readymade sculptures as beguiling and confrontational as the artist herself. Following an ascendant career in the late 1980s and ’90s as one of the art world’s most elusive, abrasive figures, Noland has largely retreated from public life since the 2000s, mainly appearing via legal counsel to litigate the validity of collectors’ attempts at either selling or restoring her work. Many saw her blockbuster 2018 retrospective at Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt and a 2021 presentation at New York’s Galerie Buchholz as her swan song, making her reappearance in 2023 with brand new work in a solo exhibition at Gagosian in New York a surprising move.
These recent works all feature in Glenstone Museum’s ‘Cady Noland’, the artist’s first US retrospective, the majority of which is drawn from the Glenstone collection. Divided into three galleries, the eponymous show begins with Our American Cousin, a large-scale installation from 1989. The dishevelled remnants of a cookout – opened Budweiser cans, a fire-engine-red grill left ajar, fake hamburgers – are cordoned off from further inspection by metal rails. Other objects, such as a car bumper and a mangled walker, surround these discards.
The largest of Glenstone’s pavilions holds some of Noland’s most notable and widely exhibited sculptures, such as Oozewald (1989), a silkscreened aluminium cut-out depicting the killing of Lee Harvey Oswald, John F. Kennedy’s assassin. (Bullet) holes are cut into the figure’s head and torso, and an American flag is rammed into one of them as if in a half-hearted attempt to stop Oswald’s bleeding. Surrounding Oozewald are Tower of Terror (1993–94) and Publyck Sculpture (1994), two monumental works that reference the architectures of prisons and playgrounds with a perversity befitting the omnipresence of carceral systems in everyday life. Elsewhere in the gallery, Noland’s grotesque silkscreened coterie of American tabloid figures – Patty Hearst, female members of the Manson Family, Richard Nixon – watch visitors as they pass through.
Following my visit to Glenstone, I kept returning to the following quote from ‘Towards a Metalanguage of Evil’: ‘[t]he psychopath leaves a trail littered with the broken, discarded bodies and lives of others, he trashes them, leaving them as rotten matter as he proceeds to his next site.’ We have, perhaps erroneously, read Noland’s text as a statement of political belief rather than a letter of intent, assuming that her identifying the psychopathy at the heart of American culture makes her immune from committing said violences. What is Our American Cousin if not one of these ‘broken, discarded bodies’ she describes: a diorama of the banal violence inflicted upon the American working class, assembled with a sense of detachment and pity? Even an older piece such as Untitled (1986) – a mobility device deputized with a sheriff’s badge – feels newly cruel amid the bullets, metal chains and grenades suspended in clear plastic cubes (all Untitled, 2023) that comprise the artist’s most recent works: reminders of what critic Emily Watlington identified, in her review of Noland’s 2023 Gagosian show, as symbols of intertwined mass incarceration and disability inflicted upon the public by our neoliberal state.
What makes Noland’s work unforgettable is also its fatal flaw: how often can an artist depict violence and degradation with a sense of detachment before they themselves become complicit in the very structures they seek to dismantle?
‘Cady Noland’ is on view at Glenstone, Potomac until 23 February
Main image: ‘Cady Noland’, 2024, exhibition view. Courtesy: © Cady Noland; Glenstone Museum, Potomac, Maryland; photograph: Ron Amstutz