Born 1942 in Urbana, Illinois, he moved to Winfield Park, New Jersey, at the age of three, and then to Westfield (also in New Jersey) at the age of 13. Dan Graham's early childhood experience of New Jersey inspired some of his early minimal art pieces.

Art and culture theorist, owner of a gallery, performance and installation artist, photographer and film producer; Graham has been a pioneer in performance and video art since the 1970's, although he never received any formal art training. Nowadays he lives and works in New York.

Pop music, video, television and architecture are some of the focuses of his work. His provocative art investigations are articulated in architectural/sculptural designs, essays, performances, installations and videos.


He has published numerous critical and theoretical essays that investigate the cultural ideology of contemporary social phenomena such as: punk music, suburbia and public architecture.

Dan Graham has described the broad practice of his work as "geometric forms inhabited and activated by the presence of the viewer, producing a sense of uneasiness and psychological alienation through a constant play between feelings of inclusion and exclusion".

He has been identified as: sculptor, minimal artist, conceptual artist, performance artist, rock music writer, pop culture critic, art critic, architecture critic and writer.

Despite such wide and differentiated activity, while highly accolated in Europe and Japan, Graham has received less recognition in his homeland, the United States, than his contemporaries and friends like Gordon Matta-Clark, Vito Acconci and Dan Flavin. As the Latins said: "Nemo propheta in patria (sua)", which means: "No one is a prophet in his homeland".

Graham's work can be seen in public collections in more than 17 countries. Some commissions in the U.S.A. are Yin/Yang at MIT, the labyrinth at the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, and at Middlebury College and in Madison Square Park. Internationally his works can be seen (for example) at Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and The Tate Gallery, London.

He has had retrospective exhibitions throughout Europe and has been represented internationally in various group exhibitions.

Dan has been a visiting teacher internationally, and has been especially influential in Halifax (at NSCAD) and Vancouver.

He is the author of Video-Architecture- Television (1980).

Copies of the works of Dan Graham can be purchased and rented for exhibition at EAI, VideoDataBank and Montevideo.
Alessandra Martina