BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION
 
Allan McCollum was born in Los Angeles, California in 1944, and now lives and works in New York. He has spent over fifty years exploring how objects achieve public and personal meaning in a world constituted in mass production, focusing recently on collaborations with small community historical society museums in different parts of the world. In 2005, he designed The Shapes Project, a system to produce "a completely unique shape for every person on the planet, without repeating." His first solo exhibition was in 1971, and his first New York showing was in an exhibition at the Sidney Janis Gallery in 1972. He moved to New York in 1975, and in the late seventies he became especially well known for his series, Surrogate Paintings.

McCollum has had over 100 solo exhibitions, including retrospectives at the Musée d'Art Moderne, Villeneuve d'Ascq, Lille, France (1998); the Sprengel Museum, Hannover, Germany (1995-96); the Serpentine Gallery, London (1990); the Rooseum Center for Contemporary Art, Malmo, Sweden (1990); IVAM Centre del Carme, Valencia, Spain (1990); Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands (1989), and Portikus, Frankfurt, Germany (1988). He has produced public art projects in the United States and Europe, and his works are held in over ninety art museum collections worldwide.

A number of interesting writers have published texts on Allan McCollum's work, including Rhea Anastas, Nicolas Bourriaud, Martha Buskirk, Lynne Cooke, Hal Foster, Andrea Fraser, Suzi Gablik, Claude Gintz, Rosalind Krauss, Thomas Lawson, MaryJo Marks, Johannes Meinhardt, John Miller, Helen Molesworth, Lars Nittve, Craig Owens, Catherine Quéloz, and Anne Rorimer. McCollum has occasionally interviewed and written essays on fellow artists for books and catalogs, including Matt Mullican, Allen Ruppersberg, Andrea Zittel, and Harrell Fletcher.


Links

Website with information on Allan McCollum
Selected texts
Dowloadable texts in PDF format
Album of images
Biography/Bibliography
Recent projects
Descriptions of different series, 1969-2004


[ Brief career summary with links: here ]
[ Career summary with critic's quotes and links: here ]
[ Career summary with critic's quotes and links and project pictures: here ]
[ A few selected quotes by the artist: here ]


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McCollum
Bio/Bibliography


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Allan McCollum
Website