November

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LAWRENCE - The University of Kansas Art Department is excited to announce artist Allan McCollum will discuss his work at 5 p.m. Monday November 10, at the Spencer Museum of Art, as part of the department's Visiting Artist Series.

The event is free and open to the public.

McCollum is an internationally-known sculptor whose latest solo exhibition opens at Kansas City's Grand Arts Nov. 7 and runs through Dec. 20. His work has been exhibited internationally and is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and many others in Europe and Asia.

He first gained art world attention for his series of "Surrogate Paintings," begun in the late 1970s, consisting of a brown frame, white mat, and black center. Always hung in groups to emphasize their interchangeability, the surrogates are intended to function as signs for paintings as well as paintings themselves.

McCollum's Grand Arts exhibition features new work titled "The Kansas and Missouri Topographical Model Project." The project culminates thousands of hours of labor, and consists of both a gallery exhibition and a documentation of an external "distribution" project: The artist created two versions of topographical models of Kansas and Missouri - a sleek ceramic version for the gallery exhibition, and a Hydrostone version which was donated to more than 100 small museums and historical societies across Kansas and Missouri.

Also at Grand Arts, McCollum also will exhibit 220 "Recognizable Image Drawings." Each identically framed, hand-drawn shape represents the shape of a county in Kansas or Missouri.

The Department of Art Visiting Artist Series brings approximately four to eight people annually to KU and is operated by the Department of Art Visiting Artist Committee, a group comprised of faculty and students, both undergraduate and graduate. The program has been responsible, for over 30 years, for bringing to Lawrence nationally to internationally recognized artists from all disciplines to lecture and meet individually with students at KU.

McCollum's talk is also held in conjunction with the Murphy Lecture series, sponsored by the Spencer Museum of Art, the Kress Foundation Department of Art History at the University of Kansas and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. The lectureship was established in 1979 through the Kansas University Endowment Association in honor of former chancellor Dr. Franklin D. Murphy.

For more information on the McCollum's lecture and work, the public may call the Department of Art at (785) 864-4401, or visit McCollum's website at http://home.att.net/~allanmcnyc. For more information on McCollum's exhibition at Grand Arts in Kansas City, please contact April Calahan-McDonald, Grand Arts assistant director, at (816) 421-6887, or gallery@grandarts.com.