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.

The emergence of Los Angeles as the “second city” of American art, as art historian Barbara Rose once called it, was witnessed by Artforum’s tenure here. Founded in San Francisco in 1962, the magazine focused almost exclusively on West Coast art during its first few years and sought to be an alternative to the mainstream New York–based art press. Yet Artforum’s short stint in Los Angeles, from 1965 to 1967, proved merely a stepping-stone on the way to New York, where it was soon lured by East Coast prestige and advertising revenue.

Shortly after the untimely death of her first husband, Rotraut Klein-Moquay set out to sea carrying a box of gold leaf. A photograph from that afternoon shows the widow shaded by a sun hat, cradling the gold in her lap just minutes before she and her companion on the trip, Yves Klein’s oldest friend, Arman, would scatter it into the Mediterranean.