In addition to his visual works, he published a large array of critical and speculative writing that spanned the spectrum from heady art theory essays, reviews of rock music, Dwight D. Eisenhower's paintings, and Dean Martin's television show.

[2] During his teens, his reading included Margaret Mead, Claude Lévi-Strauss, the literary critic Leslie Fiedler, and the French Nouveau Roman writers.

[2] Graham began his art career in 1964, at the age of 22, when he founded the John Daniels Gallery in New York City.

Commissioned work included Rooftop Urban Park Project for which he designed the piece Two-Way Mirror Cylinder Inside Cube and Video Salon (1981–1991).

His early breakthrough-work however was a series of magazine-style photographs with text, Homes for America (1966–67), which counterpoints the monotonous and alienating effect of 1960's housing developments with their supposed desirability and the physical-geometry of a printed article.

After this Graham broadened his conceptual practice with sculpture, performance, film, video including perhaps his best known works Rock My Religion (1984) and Performer/Audience/Mirror (1975).

Graham's first sculpture building project was Café Bravo at Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin.

In Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer's publication Pep Talk in 2009, Graham gave "Artists' and Architects' Work That Influenced Me" (in alphabetical order): Michael Asher, Larry Bell, Flavin, Itsuko Hasegawa, LeWitt, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Mangold, Bruce Nauman, Claes Oldenburg, Kazuo Shinohara, Michael Snow, Mies van der Rohe, and Robert Venturi.

[5] Writer Brian Wallis said that Graham's works “displayed a profound faith in the idea of the present, [he] sought to comprehend post-war American culture through imaginative new forms of analytical investigation, facto-graphic reportage, and quasi-scientific mappings of space/time relationships.”[6] Graham's work was influenced by the social change of the Civil Rights Movement, The Vietnam War, the Women's liberation movement as well as many other cultural changes.

Soon after he left the John Daniels Gallery, Graham started a series of photographs which began in the nineteen sixties and continued into the early twenty first century.

In 1969, Graham focused on performance and film that explored the social dynamic of the audience, incorporating them into the work, leading to an 80 ft photo series, Sunset to Sunrise.

[15] Graham's 1972 performance piece Two Consciousness Projections underscores a preoccupation with phenomenological aspects of relationality, utilizing the reflective capacities of video feedback.

[16] In his own writings, Graham articulated an interest in deconstructing the divisions between interior intention and visible behavior formed when looking at one's reflection in a mirror, and proposed video feedback as both a technical and conceptual means by which to achieve this.

[19] Graham produced a number of videos that documented his performance works, such as the 1972 Past Future Split Attention, in which the conversation of two acquaintances becomes a cacophony of simultaneous speech and interruption.

In it, Graham analyses the social implications of this subculture, treating it "as a tribal rite, a catalyst for the violence and frustration of its predominantly male, teenage audience.

The List Visual Arts Center at MIT calls his pavilions rigorously conceptual, uniquely beautiful, and insistently public.

The work Two-Way Mirror Cylinder Inside Cube and Video Salon was part of the Rooftop Urban Park Project.

In 1991, the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art attempted to realise the pavilion in Rotterdam's Ommoord district; the plan was eventually abandoned in 1994.

[27] In 2014, a temporary installation by Graham called Hedge Two-Way Mirror Walkabout (2014) was created on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in collaboration with the Swiss landscape architect Günther Vogt.

[28] Later, Graham worked with the British fashion designer Phoebe Philo to create an S-shaped steel-and-glass pavilion in which to show her spring/summer 2017 collection.

[36] For the 2007 Performa, Graham designed the stage set made for New York City based band Japanther's performance.

The show, which included his pavilions, architectural photographs and models, performances, and video installations, had its opening in 1994 at the Moore College of Art and Design.

Graham's work has also been exhibited at the Venice Biennale (1976, 2003, 2004 and 2005), documentas V, VI, VII, IX and X (1972, 1977, 1982, 1992 and 1997), and at Skulptur Projekte Münster '87 and '97.