Speculation vs. Need: Nancy Buchanan’s American Dream #7

Nancy Buchanan, American Dream #7: The Price is Wrong (collaboration with Carolyn Potter) (1991). Mixed media sculpture with video, 13:11 minutes. Image courtesy of the artist and The Brick. Photos: Ruben Diaz.

“They already know what we need, because they always cut off what we need,” says the community organizer Alice Harris. She is speaking with passionate clarity about the disenfranchisement of Watts, though you have to lean down and get close to see her face, visible on a miniature TV screen, barely bigger than a playing card. The TV is nestled at the back of an ornate, slightly garish living room, the biggest piece of furniture in a dollhouse-scale space that conjures a cross between The Gilded Age and Sex and the City. Nancy Buchanan made this artwork, American Dream #7: The Price is Wrong, with her collaborator Carolyn Potter in 1991. The diorama and the 13-minute video, with its documentary-style in-situ interviews and found footage, grate against one another. The juxtaposition is the point.

American Dream #7 was by no means the centerpiece of Truthfully, Nancy Buchanan, the artist’s recent retrospective at The Brick, but it was physically centered in the space; the diorama stood on a waist-high plinth in the middle of one of the largest sections of the gallery, halfway through the retrospective. The first time I visited the show I went right toward it because my two-year-old thought the little trees surrounding the white exterior walls looked like ice cream cones. Then I kept coming back to its handmade details—the silver satellite dish protruding from the roof, the gold-rimmed Art Deco furniture, the faux marble floors, and the complete lack of windows, as if to suggest the inhabitants of this comically ornate room had no desire to see outside.

American Dream #7 combines interests that have propelled Buchanan’s work since her student days. It was collaboratively made by two women with divergent sensibilities (“Carolyn had more of a pleasant take on things, and I wanted kind of an ironic edge,” Buchanan told me), and manages to be sensual and accessible despite growing out of Buchanan’s deep, ongoing research into real estate and speculation in California. The diorama was made in Potter’s home, amidst all her crafting materials and tools, and it feels intimate and domestic, even though the video pulls from interviews and footage taken all over the city, often with urban and suburban vistas, and from televised news and commercials. It is omnivorous while also focused, something that can be said of Buchanan’s practice on the whole. Nearly every work in the show at The Brick warranted a close read, and perhaps because of this I felt the need to limit my scope, to look closely at one project in order to begin to understand, and then convey, what compels me about Buchanan’s critical precision and aesthetic flexibility.

“It’s related to my investigation of speculation versus need,” Buchanan said when I asked her where American Dream #7 came from. She has been exploring this chasm between the reality of people’s lives and mythology-driven capitalist aspiration for years, with California as a recurring subject. The artist has lived in Los Angeles since childhood, punctuated by a stint teaching and living in Wisconsin in the early 1980s (where she asked Midwesterners what they thought of California for a video called California Stories, 1983). She enrolled at UCLA, paused her education to marry and have a son, then later enrolled in the first-ever class of art students at University of California, Irvine in the mid-1960s. The just-founded school arguably had the most experimental art program in the region (there were no rules, and the faculty included artists escaping the “stodginess” of academia, as Buchanan remembered one of her most supportive professors, Light and Space artist Robert Irwin, putting it).¹ Buchanan went right from the bachelor’s program into UCI’s first MFA class. With her classmates Chris Burden and Barbara T. Smith, she co-founded the cooperative gallery F Space, where Burden had a friend shoot him in the arm (Shoot, 1971) and Buchanan performed Hair Transplant (1972) with her classmate Robert Walker. In front of an audience, she shaved Walker’s mustache (which he had grown for the occasion), chest hair, underarm hair, and pubic hair and then cut her own long red hair and affixed it to Walker’s newly bare body parts. She also made a rug out of hair around that time, which the critic Barbara Rose, visiting from New York, called “disgusting.”² The declaration excited Buchanan, who wanted her art to be visceral, not just intellectual.³

Nancy Buchanan, American Dream #7: The Price is Wrong (collaboration with Carolyn Potter) (1991). Mixed media sculpture with video, 13:11 minutes. Image courtesy of the artist and The Brick. Photos: Ruben Diaz.

Nancy Buchanan, American Dream #4 (1982). Pastel and pencil on paper. Image courtesy of the artist and The Brick.

Nancy Buchanan, American Dream #3: Sweet Dreams (1981). Pastel and pencil on paper. Image courtesy of the artist and The Brick.

By the time she finished school, she was a single mother, a budding activist (she had joined Students for a Democratic Society, but, because she worried about who would care for her son if she got arrested, she made spaghetti for students participating in the sit-ins rather than participating herself)⁴ and an artist making images, performances, and videos. Within five years of graduation, she belonged to multiple feminist collectives, including the ad hoc Double X collective, and undertook a massive project using redacted FBI files related to her father, Louis Ridenour, Jr., a scientist and government consultant who had died suddenly when Buchanan was thirteen, who believed the public needed to better understand the threat of nuclear warfare. The interviews with atomic experts she did for that project informed the American Dream series, which she began in the late 1980s and included six drawings in addition to six dioramas-with-videos that she made with Potter. When she researched her father’s world, she had been struck by the way nuclear weapons—which threatened even those who lived in proximity to their testing and production—had been twisted by politicians to support the idea of American exceptionalism. The American Dream series started with drawings of mushroom clouds that referenced the way 1980s American capitalism was shaped by a return of Cold War conservatism (one cloud in the show is made of ice cream and another reveals Ronald Reagan’s grinning face), but the series evolved to explore how American exceptionalist logic widened the gap between deceptive, speculation-soaked aspiration and peoples’ lived experiences.

Buchanan’s idea for dioramas came in the late 1980s. As an art market boom coincided with a real estate market boom in Southern California, artists had started making massive video installations, turning a once intimate medium into spectacle in a way that capitulated to the art market while also literally requiring real estate. Buchanan, instead, decided to make small videos. “That was my reaction to people doing these huge projections,” she told me. She looked for tiny monitors and imagined putting them inside a domestic, interior space. She had taken a crafting workshop with Potter, a talented teacher, artist, and miniaturist who passed away in 2024, and at first, Buchanan hired Potter to make a 1950s-style interior to hold one of her small videos. Potter’s expertise and imagination—“She could make anything,” Buchanan said⁵—elevated the project so significantly that Buchanan quickly realized she was a collaborator on the project, not a fabricator. The first artwork they made together, American Dream #6 (1988), featured a modest 1950s living room in disarray (unread newspapers were spread across the floor), and the TV set played old commercials and the Army-McCarthy hearings, held after Senator Joseph McCarthy accused the US Army of bending to communist influence. Their next collaboration was American Dream #7, a turning point in the series. While Cold War exceptionalism remained a haunting specter, the work was grounded in the moment in which it was made, and the video and the diorama evolved together.

Potter and Buchanan drove around the hills of northern Pasadena when they were planning American Dream #7 and saw a number of McMansions under construction. They toured one house, and Buchanan filmed as the real estate agent showed them a bathroom that was bigger than the kitchen. They based their diorama for American Dream #7, loosely, on McMansion energy. The white exterior would look like a ranch-style house if not for the irregularly placed Corinthian columns. Inside, the two longest walls are lined with a gaudy gold and red wallpaper that Buchanan and Potter made themselves, photocopying dollhouse wallpaper and using heat to apply foil accents. Tiny faded Persian-style rugs accent the faux-marble floor. They put leopard print upholstery on the antique chairs and framed tiny prints of historic and contemporary masterpieces—most of them portraits of royals or other wealthy figures—in ornate gold frames. Above the mantle, between gold candlesticks, there’s a tiny Roy Lichtenstein print of a woman with a thought bubble above her head, which reads “I can see the whole room and there’s no one in it.” Buchanan said, “We had fun with that.” The room is full of figureheads but otherwise uninhabited, ostentatious but not apparently lived-in, while on the tiny TV screen, flanked by speakers bigger than the coffee table, the video’s narrative highlights the gap between acquisition-driven mindsets and fights for survival.

Nancy Buchanan, American Dream #8: Untitled (Relief) (collaboration with Carolyn Potter) (1999). Mixed media sculpture with video, 7 minutes and 58 seconds. Image courtesy of the artist and The Brick. Photos: Ruben Diaz.

The video unfolds in intuitive, collage-like ways. Buchanan filmed much of the footage herself, though she also borrowed from the news and commercials, and the aesthetic quality varies. Sometimes, it looks like a news feature, with the subject positioned strategically in front of an urban or suburban landscape. Sometimes, the footage—shot from a moving vehicle, for instance—has a more provisional quality. At the start of the video, the late activist Michael Zinzun, who became Buchanan’s close collaborator in the 1980s, stands in front of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion at The Music Center, saying, “I am here to remind you that there is no document of culture that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” Then the camera pans through downtown, and we see, just briefly, Barbara Kruger’s red, white, and blue Untitled (Questions) (1990/2018) looming on the side of MOCA’s Geffen Contemporary. (“Who is beyond the law? Who is bought and sold? Who is free to choose?” the mural asks in large, all-caps text.) A year after Buchanan made this video, in 1992, the mural would appear in photographs of the National Guard, sent by the first Bush administration to police the city after the 1992 uprisings—and 34 years later, in summer 2025, it would become a backdrop for Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agents sent by the Trump administration to make an example of the city. In Buchanan’s footage, the mural is just a mural, one flashpoint in the bigger battle between activists and cultural critics who want the accountability that precedes greater equity and those motivated by power accumulation. Then we are again with Buchanan and Potter (though neither appears in the footage) perusing McMansions in the foothills, before an opportunist lifted from a TV commercial tells us how we could retire in five years if we just flip the real estate around us.

From there, we go to historian Mike Davis, speaking seriously as the suburban sprawl unfolds behind him—“another example of housing without housing for people that work for a living,” quipped Buchanan. Davis, who wrote piercingly about real estate’s taint on California, was a visiting professor at CalArts, where Buchanan taught when she was working on American Dream #7 (she was on the faculty from 1988 to 2012). They filmed outside the CalArts campus in Valencia, and Davis talked loosely about the city of Los Angeles’s “lack of commitment to redevelop the economic base and the housing stock of the distressed areas of the city” and how speculative developments kept spreading out toward the Mojave Desert. We see a protest in the streets of Century City, and then the camera pans up to show people in tuxes and evening dresses looking down from the high-up balcony of the Century Plaza Hotel, built during a speculative boom in the early and mid-1960s. In the video, there is an ever-present tension between those agitating for structural change and the omnipresent evidence of speculative desire.

The video ends with footage of the 1989 funeral of murdered political activist and Black Panther Party co-founder Huey P. Newton. The congressman Ron Dellums is speaking, saying that marching through Washington, D.C. isn’t enough. Everyone needs to go to the Capitol and stay, to protest everyday: “Say ‘negotiate with me to end poverty…to right the wrongs, to challenge the evil, and to make this whole world a better place for our children, and our children’s children.’” The mourners cheer loudly enough to drown Dellums out. They have gathered because a Black Panther Party leader has been murdered in the same streets he wanted to protect. A just world feels further away, and tackling an intransigent system is an uphill battle, even if plenty of people are still fighting.

It is not right to say that American Dream #7 is prescient. It emerged from and spoke to its moment. It is, though, a testament to the power of the speculative impulse, and the late capitalist forces that propel and protect this impulse, that the artwork still feels so relevant. It is also a testament to what Buchanan’s work does so well: use close attention as the method of structural critique. The tenderly crafted and rendered details invite viewers to linger and make the work feel accessible, even intimately personable, as it excavates systemic harms.

At The Brick, on the wall across from American Dream #7, hung American Dream #8: Untitled (A Relief) (1999), another collaboration with Potter. Over a span of years, Buchanan filmed a development in her Mount Washington neighborhood as construction started, stalled due to lack of funds, restarted, and stalled again. The video, which documents the exorbitantly expensive, disruptive, and never-complete project, is embedded in a recreation of the hill interrupted by scaffolding and concrete leading to nowhere. A neighbor wrote in the wet concrete, “I am going to burn this down when you are done, I promise,” and Potter and Buchanan replicated this message, making a record of the kind of local resistance that is so often made to feel insignificant—if not invisible—by systems that privilege the desires of the few over the needs of everyone else.