by Harry Lachman on her birthday, a story that was published in the Des Moines Register. While taking graduate courses in art history at Radcliffe College, Noun's interest in art grew; she later professed that she collected, without focus, works by Arthur Dove, Lyonel Feininger, and Henry Moore. Noun first collected art by women in 1963, purchasing art by Isabel Bishop. Finding the work without a signature, Noun contacted the artist and developed a friendship. Other works by female artists collected by Noun include Natalia Goncharova, Hannah Höch, Frida Kahlo, Käthe Kollwitz, Gabriele Münter, Agnes Pelton, and Marguerite Zorach. Some female artists protested the idea of women's only art collections, citing that segregating art collections implied that a women's only art collection was of a lesser value. One artist Noun collected, Dorothea Tanning, refused to show her work in women's only art shows. She left part of her collection to the Des Moines Art Center. Activism In 1944, Louise Noun joined the Des Moines chapter of the League of Women Voters and served as president in 1948–1949, igniting her long career of activism and philanthropy. Noun served as the president of the Iowa Civil Liberties Union (now the ACLU of Iowa) for 8 years from 1964 to 1972. In the late 1960s, Noun helped finance the landmark U.S. Supreme Court students' rights case Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, with her brother Joseph Rosenfield. Noun was a founding member of the Iowa Women's Political Caucus (1973) and the National Organization for Women (NOW) Des Moines chapter, serving as coordinator from 1972 and president from 1972 to 1974. Noun served on several committees including the Bernie Lorenz Recovery House (1988), of the Young Women's Resource Center (1975–1982), and the American Friends Service Committee. Noun founded the Chrysalis Foundation in 1989, serving as president until her death in 2002. Iowa Women's Archives Louise Noun and Mary Louise Smith, the former chair of the Republican National Committee, worked together to found the Iowa Women's Archives at the University of Iowa Main Library. The idea was conceived by Noun in the 1960s while researching Strong-Minded Women: The Emergence of the Woman-Suffrage Movement in Iowa. To fund the archives, Noun sold Frida Kahlo's 1947 painting "Self-Portrait with Loose Hair" at Christie's New York for 1.65 million dollars. The sale set a record for the most expensive work by a Latin American artist ever