Collection of One Hundred Plaster Surrogates, 1982/90. Enamel on cast Hydrostone. Collection of the Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen, Belgium.

Allan McCollum is a contemporary American artist who was born in Los Angeles, California in 1944, and now lives and works in New York City. He has spent over thirty years exploring how objects achieve public and personal meaning in a world constituted in mass production, focusing most recently on collaborations with small community historical society museums in different parts of the world. His first solo exhibition was in 1970, and his first New York showing was in an exhibition at the Sidney Janis Gallery in 1972. In 1975 his work was included in the Whitney Biennial, and he moved to New York City that same year. In the late seventies he became especially well known for his series, Surrogate Paintings. Image File history File links No higher resolution available. ... Nickname: City of Angels Location within Los Angeles County in the state of California Coordinates: State California County Los Angeles County Incorporated April 4, 1850 Government  - Type mayor-council  - Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa (D)  - City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo  - Governing body City Council Area  - City  498. ... 1944 (MCMXLIV) was a leap year starting on Saturday. ... Nickname: Big Apple, Gotham, NYC, City That Never Sleeps, The Concrete Jungle, The City So Nice They Named It Twice Location in the state of New York Coordinates: Country United States State New York Boroughs The Bronx Brooklyn Manhattan Queens Staten Island Settled 1676 Government  - Mayor Michael Bloomberg (R) Area... Sidney Janis (1896-1989) was a wealthy clothing manufacturer and art collector who opened an art gallery in New York in 1948. ... The banner of the 2006 Whitney Biennial: Day For Night in front of the Whitney Museum of American Art. ...

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). Saint-Pierre dAscq church Located between Lille and Roubaix, at the crossroads of the principal freeways towards Paris, Ghent, Antwerp and Brussels, Villeneuve dAscq (which means New city of Ascq in French) is one of the principal cities of the communauté urbaine Lille Métropole. ... The Sprengel Museum in Hanover The Sprengel Museum in Hanover houses one of the most significant collections of modern art in Germany. ... The Serpentine Gallery is an art gallery in Kensington Gardens, central London, which focuses on modern and contempory art. ... The Rooseum Center for Contemporary Art, located in Malmö, Sweden, is one of the foremost centers for contemporary art in Europe. ... The Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven Van Abbemuseum is a museum of modern art located in the city of Eindhoven in the Netherlands close to the Dommel river. ... Portikus is an exhibition hall for contemporary art in Frankfurt am Main, originally founded in 1987 through the initiation of Kaspar König, one of the most influential living curators of contemporary art. ...

Over Ten Thousand Individual Works, (detail) 1987/91. Acrylic on cast Hydrocal. Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

He participated in the Aperto at the 1988 Venice Biennale, his works have been exhibited in the United States White House, he has produced numerous public art projects in the United States and Europe, and his works are held in over seventy art museum collections worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. Image File history File links No higher resolution available. ... Detail of exhibition. ... North façade of the White House, seen from Pennsylvania Avenue. ... View across garden, in new MoMA building by Yoshio Taniguchi. ... Metropolitan Museum of Art New York Elevation The Metropolitan Museum of Art, often referred to simply as The Met, is one of the worlds largest and most important art museums. ... Night view of Whitney Museum of American Art The Whitney Museum of American Art is an art gallery and museum in New York City founded in 1931 by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. ... The front of the Guggenheim Museum from 5th Avenue This article refers to the Guggenheim Museum in the upper east side of Manhattan (New York). ... The Art Institute of Chicago is one of the premier fine art institutions in the United States. ... MOCA, Downtown Los Angeles The Museum of Contemporary Art was founded in 1974 by a group of individuals; however, it had no permanent museum space until the 1980s. ...

McCollum is known for utilizing the methods of mass production in his art work in many different ways, often generating thousands of objects that, while produced in large quantity, are each unique. In 1988-91 he created over thirty thousand completely unique objects he titled Individual works, which were gathered and exhibited in collections of over ten thousand. The objects were made by taking many dozens of rubber molds from common household objects—like bottle caps, food containers, and kitchen tools—and combining plaster casts of these parts in thousands of possible ways, never repeating a combination. In 1989, he used a similar system to create thousands of handmade graphite pencil drawings, using hundreds of plastic drafting templates he designed for this purpose, each drawing made unique by combining the templates according to a combinatorial protocol that never repeated itself. Mass production is the production of large amounts of standardised products on production lines. ... One half of a bronze mould for casting a socketed spear head dated to the period 1400-1000 BC. There are no known parallels for this mould. ... Combinatorics is a branch of mathematics that studies collections (usually finite) of objects that satisfy specified criteria. ...

Recently, the artist designed The Shapes Project, a system to produce a completely unique shape for every person on the planet, without repeating. Six Shapes from The Shapes Project The Shapes Project Working in 2005-2006, American artist Allan McCollum designed a system to produce unique two-dimensional shapes. ...

External links

• An informational website on the artist
• The Kansas and Missouri Topographical Model Donation Project
• The Natural Copies from the Coal Mines of Central Utah Project
• Interview (THE EVENT: PETRIFIED LIGHTNING FROM CENTRAL FLORIDA) with Allan McCollum and associated mass quantities of PDF's related to the subject of fulgurites.
• Introduction to The Shapes Project