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A leading figure of Minimal art, Donald Judd initially trained as a painter, taking night classes at the Art Students League in New York while studying art history at Columbia University during the day. In the early 1960s, he abandoned painting to create what he called "specific objects," first in wood and later in a range of materials including Perspex, galvanized iron, painted steel, aluminum, and concrete. The AMAM work, fabricated to Judd's design from industrial materials, comprises an anodized rectangular tube with chartreuse anodized boxes. The simple arrangement of his artworks was created with no meaning or composition in mind; instead, Judd said, they are "just there."

Judd was active as an art critic for ARTnews, Art International, Arts Magazine, and other journals during the early 1960s. His seminal 1965 article, "Specific Objects," described the new kind of three-dimensional work being made by himself and other artists who came to be known as Minimalists (a term that Judd himself rejected). Although he referred in his writings to a broad group of seemingly diverse artists-Robert Morris, Jasper Johns, Yayoi Kusama, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella, and Dan Flavin-in all of them he recognized the use of new material, "either recent inventions or things not used before in art," and above all, the singleness he sought to express in his own work.

Later in his career, Judd advocated for the permanent installation of his increasingly large-scale work, as well as that of his contemporaries-a group including John Chamberlain, Dan Flavin, Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, and Carl Andre- in carefully chosen environments. This vision is enacted primarily in the spaces of a former army base, Fort Russell, in the remote west Texas town of Marfa. Composed of 340 acres of land, the Chinati Foundation opened to the public in 1986.