including the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. Artwork McCollum's family history, his experiences and training at working in industrial kitchens, and his interest in theater and Fluxus, including "task-oriented" performance art, offered him a unique take on labor and art, and the methods and systems of quantity-production showed themselves in his artwork from the beginning. He is known for utilizing the methods of mass production in his work in many different ways, often creating thousands of objects that, while produced in large quantity, are each unique. In 1988-91, he created over 30,000 completely unique objects he titled Individual Works, which were gathered and exhibited in collections of over 10,000. The objects were made by taking many dozens of rubber molds from common household objects—like bottle caps, food containers, and kitchen tools—and combining plaster casts of these parts in thousands of possible ways, never repeating a combination. In 1989, he used a similar system to create thousands of handmade graphite pencil drawings, using hundreds of plastic drafting templates he designed for this purpose, each drawing made unique by combining the templates according to a combinatorial protocol that never repeated itself. Beginning in the early 1990s, McCollum expanded his interests in quantity production to include explorations into the ways regional communities give meaning to local landmarks and geological oddities in establishing community identity, and collaborated with a number of small towns and small historical museums in Europe and the United States, bringing attention to the way local narratives develop around objects peculiar to geographic regions, and drawing comparisons to the way artworks develop meaning in a parallel manner. Often these projects involved reproducing local objects in quantity, or creating models or copies of local artifacts and symbols. In 1995, he collaborated with the College of Eastern Utah Prehistoric Museum in Price, Utah, to make replicas of its entire collection of dinosaur track casts, and exhibited these in New York and Europe. In 1997, he collaborated with the International Center for Lightning Research and Testing in Starke, Florida, to trigger lightning with rockets and worked with a local souvenir manufacturer to create over 10,000 replicas of a fulgurite created by the lightning strike.