Discussion | Artists Allan McCollum and Josiah McElheny in Conversation

On the eve of the fifth-season premiere of the Peabody Award winning PBS television series art:21 — Art in the Twenty-first Century, a conversation with Season Five featured artist Allan McCollum and Season Three artist Josiah McElheny will be preceded by a screening of McCollum’s segment. He is best known for creating large quantities of nearly identical-yet still unique-component objects, which then constitute a single work of art.

Applying strategies of mass production to hand-made objects, McCollum’s labor-intensive practice questions the intrinsic value of the unique work of art. McCollum’s installations—fields of vast numbers of small-scale works, systematically arranged—are the product of many tiny gestures, built up over time. McCollum has had more than 100 solo exhibitions in Europe and the United States, where his work has appeared in major exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2009); Museum of Modern Art, New York (most recently in 2007); and the Guggenheim Museum, New York (2004), among others. He has also participated in many international exhibitions, most recently at the Bienal de São Paulo (2008). Recent solo exhibitions include Friedrich Petzel Gallery , New York (2009); Barbara Krakow Gallery, Boston (2008); and Musée d'art moderne et contemporain, Geneva (2006), among others.

McElheny creates finely crafted, handmade glass objects that he combines with photographs, text, and museological displays to evoke notions of meaning and memory. Whether recreating miraculous glass objects pictured in Renaissance paintings or modernized versions of nonextant glassware from documentary photographs, or extrapolating stories about the daily lives of ancient peoples through the remnants of their glass household possessions, McElheny’s work takes as its subject the object, idea, and social nexus of glass. Recipient of a MacArthur Genius Grant (2006), a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (1995) and the 15th Rakow Commission from the Corning Museum of Glass, McElheny has had one-person exhibitions at the Henry Art Gallery , Seattle ; Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum , Boston ; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco ; and Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela.