Born in Asheville, North Carolina, Noland attended the experimental Black Mountain College. He is identified as an abstract expressionist.
He became friends with Morris Louis, and the pair of them adopted Helen Frankenthaler's technique of allowing acrylic paint to soak into unprimed canvases. Noland went on to paint pictures of targets (pre-empting Jasper Johns) and later concentrated on hard-edged chevron- and stripe-based designs.