16 Facts About Allan McCollum

Allan McCollum was born on 4 August 1944 and is a contemporary American artist who lives and works in New York City.

Allan McCollum has spent over fifty years exploring how objects achieve public and personal meaning in a world caught up in the contradictions made between unique handmade artworks and objects of mass production, and in the early 1990s, he began focusing most on collaborations with small regional communities and historical society museums in different parts of the world.

Allan McCollum remained active in local theater groups throughout much of his life, while working as a security guard at a local research corporation.

Allan McCollum's mother's brother, Sam Hinton, was a well-known folk singer and folk music historian in Southern California, and his mother's sister's husband was Jon Gnagy, the popular television art instructor who between 1946 and 1970 had the longest continuously running show on television.

In 1964, Allan McCollum moved to Essex, England, pursuing the idea of being an actor, and joined a local theater group in Southend-on-Sea, but he changed his mind about a career in theater and returned to California in 1965, moved into a small mobile home park in Venice Beach, California, and attended Los Angeles Trade Technical College for five months, attempting to learn the trade of restaurant management and industrial kitchen work.

Allan McCollum learned quickly, influenced initially by reading the writings of the Fluxus artists and the early structuralists, and found a job as a truck driver and crate-builder for an art handling company in West Hollywood.

Allan McCollum's work was shown in a number of museum group exhibitions, including shows at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Pasadena Art Museum, the Long Beach Museum of Art, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the Oakland Museum, the San Francisco Art Institute, the Seattle Art Museum, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Krannert Art Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

Allan McCollum has had over 140 solo exhibitions, including retrospectives at the Musee d'Art Moderne in Lille, France, the Sprengel Museum in Hannover, Germany, the Serpentine Gallery in London ; the Rooseum Center for Contemporary Art in Malmo, Sweden, IVAM Centre del Carme in Valencia, Spain ; Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, The Netherlands and Portikus in Frankfurt, Germany.

Allan McCollum participated in the Aperto at the Venice Biennale in 1988 and 2012.

Allan McCollum's works have been exhibited in the United States White House.

Allan McCollum has produced numerous public art projects in the United States and Europe, and his works are held in over ninety art museum collections worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC.

Allan McCollum is known for utilizing the methods of mass production in his work in many different ways, often creating thousands of objects that, while produced in large quantity, are each unique.

Allan McCollum has used the system in collaborations with a community library, schoolchildren, home craftworkers, writers, architects and other artists, as the Shapes are created to be used for many different kinds of projects, and so far have been produced in the form of both prints and sculpture, in Plexiglas, Corian, plywood, hardwoods, metals, rubber and fabric, in a variety of sizes.

Allan McCollum has been a recipient of an NEA Special Project Grant and an Individual Support Grant from the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation.

Allan McCollum has occasionally collaborated with other artists in producing projects, including Louise Lawler, Andrea Fraser, Laurie Simmons, Matt Mullican, Andrea Zittel, Allen Ruppersberg, Pablo Helguera, Astrid Preston and Cynthia Daignault.

Allan McCollum has written texts and interviewed fellow artists for books and catalogs, including Matt Mullican Allen Ruppersberg, Andrea Zittel, Roxy Paine, and Harrell Fletcher.