College for five months, attempting to learn the trade of restaurant management and industrial kitchen work. For two years, he worked for Trans World Airlines at the Los Angeles International Airport, preparing meals for flights but, in 1967, he decided to educate himself as an artist. He learned quickly, influenced initially by reading the writings of the Fluxus artists and the early structuralists, and found a job as a truck driver and crate-builder for an art handling company in West Hollywood. Through this job he met many artists, art dealers, art collectors and museum curators, learning much about the contemporary art world. During the late 1960s, McCollum produced his early work while living in small rented storefront spaces, first in Venice Beach, and later in Santa Monica. In 1970, he established a studio in a converted parking garage in Venice Beach, where he lived and worked until 1975. During these years, he exhibited his work regularly at the Nicholas Wilder Gallery and also at the Claire Copley Gallery, both in Los Angeles. His work was shown in a number of museum group exhibitions, including shows at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Pasadena Art Museum, the Long Beach Museum of Art, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the Oakland Museum, the San Francisco Art Institute, the Seattle Art Museum, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Krannert Art Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. In late 1975, he moved to the SoHo district of New York City, where he initially worked as a guard at the Whitney Museum. Exhibition history McCollum has had over 140 solo exhibitions, including retrospectives at the Musée d'Art Moderne in Lille, France (1998), the Sprengel Museum in Hannover, Germany (1995–96), the Serpentine Gallery in London (1990); the Rooseum Center for Contemporary Art in Malmo, Sweden (1990), IVAM Centre del Carme in Valencia, Spain (1990); Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, The Netherlands (1989) and Portikus in Frankfurt, Germany (1988). He participated in the Aperto at the Venice Biennale in 1988 and 2012. In 2008, McCollum exhibited 1,800 drawings from his 1988-91 Drawings project at the 28th Bienal de São Paulo in São Paulo, Brazil. His works have been exhibited in the United States White House. He has produced numerous public art projects in the United States and Europe, and his works are held in over ninety art museum collections worldwide,