Allan McCollum

(American, b. 1944)

The Recognizable Image Drawings (Missouri and Kansas counties along the state line), 2003

Graphite on rag paper, 24 individually framed works

9 1/4" x 9 1/4" (each frame)

Every drawing is individually signed, dated, and titled on the reverse of the paper. 

For much of his career, artist Allan McCollum has explored the concept of recognizability, the personal reaction an individual might have to a symbol, word, or object. Recognition is experiential and specific. For his Small World Drawings (2000) and Each and Every One of You series (2004), McCollum created thousands of individual works spelling out different names; not only are viewers tacitly invited to search for their own name, but any given name might evoke myriad memories or associations. For New City Markers project (2001), the artist invented a series of unique symbols to represent individual apartment units and buildings comprising a neighborhood in Malmo, Sweden, affixing sheet metal emblems above each residence as a kind of symbolic street address.

In the 1990s, McCollum began a succession of ambitious regional projects to satiate a growing desire to create works whose interest transcend the fine art world. With Natural Copies from the Coal Mines of Central Utah (1994), he cooperated with the College of Eastern Utah Prehistoric Museum to create casts of fossilized dinosaur footprints. For The Event: Petrified Lightning from Central Florida (1998), the artist worked with a team of scientists to trigger lightning to strike and liquefy columns of sand, then created casts of the resulting fulgurites.

Combining his curiosity around the specificity of experience with an interest in the natural world and its historical markers, in 2003 McCollum completed The Kansas and Missouri Topographical Model Project and its accompanying series The Recognizable Image Drawings. For the former project, he precisely rendered the topography of the two states in cast hydrostone slabs, which he donated to 120 regional historical society museums to be used for any educational purpose they saw fit. He then created The Recognizable Image Drawings, graphite silhouettes of each of the counties in the two states. This unique series of 24 Recognizable Image Drawings, representing each of the counties along the Kansas-Missouri border, was created for and given to Kansas City-based architectural historian Cydney Millstein.

The series visually echoes the language of McCollum's Surrogate Paintings (1978), with numerous small shapes individually framed, elements combined for a larger whole. The borders of counties might be "recognizable images" for only its residents, just as the names of the artist's Small World Drawings may hold dramatically different associations (or no associations at all) depending on each viewer's lived experience.

In an interview published in the magazine Review, McCollum offered his own thoughts on The Recognizable Image Drawings: "People recognize the shape of their state... but also I think it’s interesting to get more specific with that, to go further than one might expect, to get more personal and zoom in on the counties. There’s a significance to the term 'recognizable.' Number one, most people don’t recognize their own counties, and I like that paradox, because you probably should, but we don’t. I don’t know what the county I grew up in looks like. I’ve been thinking about what recognizability is. I’ve done a lot of works like the Perpetual Photos series, which are about things that are not recognizable – trying to elicit that desire to recognize something, knowing that it can’t be fulfilled. What part of human yearning does that draw out? There’ve been a few projects that have involved things that are out of focus, or blurry, and I think that the county drawings are a little bit related to that, and that’s why I chose the word 'recognizable,' because to me, it suggests that border between recognizablility and unrecognizability."

Excellent condition.