La Conchita is hugged by mountains and is as close to the ocean as it is possible for non-millionaires to get anywhere between San Francisco and Mexico. It brought Roger Brown closer to the man he loved, whom he had lost only years before. It was the place in which he chose to draw closer to death, in an imperfect paradise of his own devising.

Jim Shaw is a major figure in contemporary art whose career began in music, with his early collaborative work with Mike Kelley in the 1970s anti-rock band Destroy All Monsters. Since then, he has gone on to work in a range of media, from drawing and sculpture to performance, producing a perverse and radical reimagining of American culture. I worked for Shaw for several years, getting an up-close view of how he developed his work, which often started with a joke or coincidence that would later become a beautifully crafted object. We met in October 2013 to discuss art history, psychoanalysis, and the ways that unconscious processes inform his highly conceptual practice.

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.