Dan Graham

Using an inexpensive Kodak Instamatic camera and a deliberately amateur approach, Dan Graham catalogued the cookie-cutter row houses of postwar suburban New Jersey. The photographs became the inspiration for Homes for America, Graham’s critical inquiry into the social, political, and cultural systems of the 1960s. Graham intended to publish his work in the pages of a glossy magazine, transforming this pop culture venue into a space for exhibition. The artist failed to tempt major publications like Esquire into printing it, so Homes for America first appeared in Arts Magazine in 1966. On a separate critical tangent, the artist also equated the banal repetition of prefabricated tract housing to the industrially fabricated forms of Minimalist sculpture