Allan McCollum

Jeff Grimes

Allan McCollum was born in 1944. When he was about 20 he began to consider an occupation in theater, he then changed his mind and attended school to study restaurant management. In the 1960s, he began to teach himself to be an artist. He began using pieces of ordinary supplies to design art. When viewing his work people often get the effect of being intoxicated. You slowly realize that a large number of identical patterns are made of many different items. His artwork incorporates the aides of scientists and many local artists. McCollum uses a collaborative and democratic form of creativity, his drawings and sculptures usually have a very an illustrative purpose.

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He has had more than one hundred solo exhibitions in both Europe and the United States. Allot his work has appeared in displays at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. He has also been in many overseas shows, an example is the Bienal de São Paulo.

He is known for using the techniques of mass production in his work, while made in large quantity and are unique. In 1988-91 he made over 30,000 completely different objects he titled Individual Works, which were collected and displayed in large amounts. The objects were created by many rubber molds found in common household objects such as bottle caps, food containers, and kitchen tools. In 1989, he used the same system to create thousands of handmade pencil drawings, using hundreds of templates he designed. Each drawing was made differently by uniting the templates according to a “combinatorial protocol” that never repeated itself.

Beginning in the early nineties, McCollum expanded his interests in quantity production to include explorations into the ways regional communities give meaning to local landmarks and geological oddities in establishing community identity, and collaborated with a number of small towns and small historical museums in Europe and throughout the United States, bringing attention to the way local narratives develop around objects peculiar to geographic regions, and drawing comparisons to the way artworks develop meaning in a parallel manner. Often these projects involved reproducing local objects in quantity or creating models or copies of local artifacts and symbols. In 1995, he collaborated with the College of Eastern Utah Prehistoric Museum in Price, Utah, to make replicas of their entire collection of dinosaur track casts, and exhibited these in New York and throughout Europe; in 1997 he collaborated with the International Center for Lightning Research and Testing in Starke, Florida, to trigger lightning with rockets, and worked with a local souvenir manufacturer to create over 10,000 replicas of a fulgurite created by the lightning strike.