When you type “Chris Burden” into Google Images there are no pictures of him smiling. When you type “Chris Burden smiling,” nothing much changes. I mean, there are a few shots. The mechanical gesture doesn’t ever, as far as I can tell, reach past half-face to the eyes. Of course, nobody except a writer doing weird things with Google cares if a man doesn’t smile. It is, as they say, a non-starter.

For more than 40 years, Lita Albuquerque’s work has delivered a sense of timeless mythos into the practice of contemporary art. Creating site-specific installations, performances, and films in far-flung places from North Africa to the South Pole, she strikingly invigorates the enduring dialogue between earth and sky.

“Oxymoronic” is how Kerry Tribe describes the starting point for The Aphasia Poetry Club (2016), her interview-based, first-person documentary about people who have lost the ability to comprehend language. In Tribe’s three-channel video installation, communication is stunningly reconstituted with excavated words and newly invented images.

Mike Kelley took the 19th-century German notion of Gesamtkuntswerk and made it flourish in the Rust Belt soil of late 20th-century America. His phantasmagorical performances and multifarious installations were subversive, scholarly, and ingenious, deploying a set of compositional strategies that can be understood as an epic iteration of Kelley's reliance on multiple authorial voices.

Samara Golden, an “interdimensional artist,” creates boundary-breaking installations—vivid concatenations assembled from psychological states, misremembered architectural interiors, and transitional objects. Utilizing everything from 3D anaglyphic photographs to pantyhose, she dives deeply into the other side of the looking glass and alters reality through simple means.

Artist Billy Al Bengston and architect Frank Gehry have been friends for more than 50 years. In 1968, when Bengston was given a museum survey at LACMA, they collaborated on the installation: Reconfiguring the galleries with plywood walls, borrowed furniture, Black Power posters, they knocked exhibition design out of the white cube.