If contemporary art is a love story, then Cady Noland is the one who got away. In the nineteen-eighties and -nineties, the New York-based sculptor commanded the same critical respect (and attracted the same swooning collectors) as her peers Robert Gober and Christopher Wool, thanks to her gimlet-eyed take on America’s tarnished myths of itself, from the gun violence of the Old West, to the glamorization of criminals like Charles Manson. Then, at the height of her career—with works in major museum collections including MOMA and the Guggenheim—she walked away.
So it is a coup, to say the least, that Noland has agreed to work with the thoughtful curator Sandra Antelo-Suarez on this exhibition, contributing a metal gate, outfitted with equestrian gear and rounds of ammunition, from 1989, and a stockade draped with an American flag, excised with holes (for a head, hands, and feet), made in 1993-94. Antelo-Suarez also makes a persuasive, if theatrical, case for Calder as a political artist, exhibiting, for the first time outside the artist’s Connecticut studio, a hulking red-and-black stabile from 1972, the same year he took out a two-page spread in the Times demanding the impeachment of Nixon. Perhaps the Calder Foundation will consider doing the same with regard to our forty-fifth President.
— The New Yorker