Allan McCollum

Born in 1944 in California, Allan McCollum lives and works in New York City. He has shown extensively, produced public art projects in the United States and Europe, and his works are in nearly seventy major art museum collections worldwide.

Friends and Family a Sequel

In 2004, Allan McCollum collaborated with printers at Graphicstudio to create the first Names project, titled Each and Every One of You. The project consisted of 1,200 names of males and females taken from the 2000 census and produced as archival pigment prints. Single names could not be purchased from the portfolios, so Allan developed a supplemental project titled Friends and Family and collectors were invited to place orders for names of friends and family. The project lasted for one year.

In 2020-2022, Graphicstudio collaborated with Allan McCollum to offer a new project: Friends and Family a Sequel. Collectors placed orders for names of friends and family, that were produced at Graphicstudio, signed by the artist, and delivered with a black metal frame. Each print was numbered in the order that it is printed, with multiples of the same name indicated.

Lands of Shadow and Substance

Allan McCollum viewed the original Twilight Zone episodes from 1959 to 1964 on his laptop computer, capturing screenshots of scenes that included landscape paintings. Images of those paintings were digitally edited, printed, and custom framed to create the series entitled Lands of Shadow and Substance. Each of the 27 works in the series has been printed proportionally to its original televised incarnation and is in an edition of three.

The Shapes Project

To create The Shapes Project, Allan McCollum designed a system to create over 31 billion unique two-dimensional shapes: one for every person on the planet when the globe's population peaks in 2050. Not generated, but rather ingeniously formulated using Adobe Illustrator, each shape is created by a series of consecutive actions of first drawing small parts and then cutting and pasting them further into bigger parts. According to Allan McCollum: "For the time being, around 214,000,000 of the shapes have been set aside for creative experimentation. These can be used for many different purposes—not only for fine art and design projects, but also for various social practices as: gifts, awards, identity markers, emblems, insignias, logos, toys, souvenirs, educational tools, and so forth. The shapes can be printed graphically as silhouettes or outlines, in any size, color or texture, using all varieties of graphics software; or the files can be used by rapid prototyping machines and computer-numerically-controlled (CNC) equipment—such as routers, laser and water-jet cutter—to build, carve, or cut the shapes from wood, plastic, metal, stone, and other materials."

During the summer and fall of 2006, Graphicstudio published a series of twenty-five sculptural shapes employing the artist's digital files to drive a CNC router to cut a set of eight identical shapes out of birch plywood. To produce each unique sculpture, the layers of wood were glued and clamped together into a solid form, which was then sanded and finished with two coats of satin lacquer.

The Shapes Project is McCollum's latest visualization of his career-long interest in issues related to representation, categorization, symbolic systems, and questions of uniqueness, originality and mass production. McCollum reflects on his Shapes Project: "Instead of looking to one flag and saying 'that's our country,' we now have 31 billion shapes to represent each of us. We need to question the way we use our symbols, because for every reason we have to unify ourselves under a single symbol, there are many more for doing the opposite."

Each and Every One of You

In this project, Allan McCollum has delivered a poignant work: Each and Every One of You, an arresting exploration of the emotional investment we all share in giving each other names. "There is a fearful void," says McCollum, "in the gap between the names we are given and the presence we have with one another."

Hoping to evoke an avalanche of memory and feeling with the simplest of means, he researched the U.S. Census Bureau's compilation of common names used in the U.S. from the year 2000, and produced 3 portfolios of 1200 prints each: the 600 most common female names and the 600 most common male names. Each portfolio is ordered according to popularity into two handmade walnut boxes. Each and Every One of You was first exhibited at the Barbara Krakow Gallery in Boston, Massachusetts.

Further Resources

Artist's Site: allanmccollum.net

Printmaking + Sculpture Terms

Printmaking Glossary

Sculpture Glossary

Sales

For sales, or more information about an edition, please contact Graphicstudio at (813) 974-3503 or gsoffice@usf.edu.

Copyright + Reproduction

Images of the artwork are jointly owned by the artist and Graphicstudio. Reproduction of any kind including electronic media must be expressly approved by Graphicstudio.