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 1971, 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.

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 participated in the Aperto at the 1988 Venice Biennale, has produced public art projects in the United States and Europe, and his works are held in nearly 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 Art Institute of Chicago, and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art.

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

Contemporary art | Conceptual artists | Contemporary artists | Postmodern artists | New York artists | 1944 births | Living people