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.

Chrysalis: A Magazine of Women’s Culture (1977-1980) was a short-lived but influential feminist publication that was collectively produced by artists and writers active in the Los Angeles feminist movement. Chrysalis’ complete integration of art, literature, and cultural studies was distinct from other journals of the era, in particular, Heresies, which began the same year in New York.

"What does the avant-garde look and sound like when it blooms outside the hothouse of the bourgeoisie?" When Asco, the self-named Chicano art collective, first collapsed the space between graffiti and conceptual art, their streetwise institutional critique started delivering an abundance of unforgettable answers.

George Herms has been making art and theater in California for over five decades. He was a founder of the West Coast assemblage movement and traveled in the circles of Beatnik poets and Wallace Berman’s Semina group. Mark Allen founded Machine Project, a nonprofit storefront in Los Angeles's Echo Park neighborhood, in 2003. Machine Project operates as a classroom, laboratory, performance venue and gallery, blurring distinctions between learning and teaching, amateur and expert, and various forms of artistic and scientific creativity. East of Borneo brought Allen and Herms together because of their impact in shaping the cultural landscape of Los Angeles, and their shared interest in questioning what it means to be an artist.