Cady Noland (born 1956) is an American sculptor, printmaker, and installation artist who primarily works with found objects and appropriated images. Her work, often made with objects denoting danger, industry, and American patriotism, addresses notions including the failed promise of the American Dream, the divide between fame and anonymity, and violence in American society. Many of her works have involved different kinds of physical barriers in gallery spaces, including fences, barricades, and metal poles to guide or restrict the audience's movements. She has drawn extensively on media and tabloid imagery, regularly using images of notable criminals, celebrities, and public figures involved in scandal. Art critic Peter Schjeldahl called Noland "a dark poet of the national unconscious."

Noland has participated in several high profile exhibitions, including the 44th Venice Biennale (1990), the Whitney Biennial (1991), and Documenta 9 (1992). After widely exhibiting her art in the 1980s and 1990s to broad acclaim, Noland largely stopped presenting her work for nearly two decades. She began exhibiting again in the late 2010s, staging a museum retrospective in 2018 and exhibitions of new work in the early 2020s. Critics have written extensively about her influence on contemporary art beginning in the 1990s, in particular the seeming visual randomness of her often-sprawling installations that has been broadly emulated by other artists.

She is also known for her numerous disputes and lawsuits with museums, galleries, and collectors over their handling of her work. Noland was the subject of several legal disputes with collectors in the 2010s after she disavowed artworks that she no longer considered genuine due to damage or restoration. On several occasions she has requested the removal of her work from group exhibitions, and she has required art dealers and gallerists to post disclaimers at unauthorized exhibitions to inform audiences that she did not agree to participate. She has also been noted for her reluctance to be publicly identified, having only ever allowed two photographs of herself to be publicly released.

Cady Noland was born in 1956 in Washington, D.C., the daughter of Kenneth Noland and Cornelia Langer.

Kenneth was a well-known abstract painter, and Langer, also an artist, co-owned a boutique in Alexandria, Virginia. They divorced in 1957. Her father Kenneth moved to New York City and lived in the Chelsea Hotel before buying a property in Shaftsbury, Vermont, and her mother eventually remarried to Dr. Donald J. Reis in 1985. At the encouragement of art critic Clement Greenberg, her father became an active member of the Sullivanian psychotherapy cult run by Saul B. Newton, which encouraged participants to discard their familial relations; Langer was later photographed for an article in The New York Times about a custody trial related to the cult and was identified with two other women as "relatives of Sullivanian collective members".

Author Nick Stillman has written that Noland grew up in New York, but it is unclear when she moved to the city or with which parent she lived; she sometimes spent time as a child at her father's property in Vermont. As an adult she said she "came from" Washington, D.C., calling it "a city of façade" and adding, "What's behind it? We're two-faced!" She has also said that growing up around her father's practice helped her to understand the machinations of the art world from an early age: "Dealers were already demystified for me."

Noland attended Sarah Lawrence College, Langer's alma mater, and lived in Manhattan after graduation. While in college she studied under sociology professor Stephen N. Butler, whom she would later dedicate a book to.

Noland first exhibited her art in 1981 at the nonprofit Washington Square East Galleries in a group exhibition juried by art historian and critic Marcia Tucker. She then began making artworks with found objects in 1983. Among her earliest works was Total Institution (1984), a multimedia assemblage sculpture created with items including a phone receiver, toilet seat, and rubber chicken hanging from a rack on a wall. Noland exhibited several found object artworks at Peter Nagy's gallery Nature Morte in 1987. She presented Shuttle, an assemblage work featuring shiny car parts placed on an extremely old, rusted wheeled cart. The cart was attached to a railing installed on the wall, creating a kind of track that the cart could not escape. Additionally, she exhibited Mirror Device, a small wall-based mirror work featuring a bright orange flare gun and handcuffs hanging from a horizontal metal bar attached to the front of the mirror. Noland met artist Steven Parrino at an opening for an exhibition at the gallery, and the two became friends and colleagues.