Following Mike Kelley's death in 2012, a spontaneous memorial sprung up in an abandoned carport in his Los Angeles neighborhood: a makeshift altar heaped with tattered stuffed animals, dripping candles, homemade afghans, and handwritten notes, a public yearning to capture Kelley's spirit and share in a grievous loss.

Groucho Marx as Village Priest: For over 25 years, artist Robert "Baza" Alexander (1923–87) and his unorthodox, Venice Beach-based ministry the Temple of Man performed rites of art, poetry, roller-skate weddings, and good deeds that embodied Wallace Berman's well-known maxim "Art is Love is God."

In 1965, when Larry Bell arrived in New York from Southern California to begin work on the exhibition at the Pace Gallery that would define his career, Minimal art was in full swing. At that time most of the major artists associated with this movement were in New York. The galvanized-steel cubes of Judd, the L-shaped beams of Morris, the die-cut “alloy planes” of Andre...

In this interview, Rosamund Felsen describes engaging in the nascent 1960s Los Angeles art world; the founding of Gemini GEL with her husband, Sidney, and Stanley and Elyse Grinstein; working in the now-defunct Pasadena Art Museum and that museum’s downfall; starting a gallery to show younger artists making nontraditional forms of art; the financial difficulties of exhibiting Conceptual art; and the importance of art schools in forming a regional art scene.