During his long, high-spirited career, photographer John Coplans (1920-2003) served as director of the Akron Art Museum, editor in chief of Artforum, and senior curator of the Pasadena Museum of Art. In this 1975 Artforum essay, he recounts the Pasadena Museum's financial collapse and subsequent takeover by powerful Southern California industrialist Norton Simon.

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.

Artist and musician Terry Allen describes his friendship with Al Ruppersberg when they were students at Chouinard Art Institute and talks about Ruppersberg’s seminal environmental project, Al’s Café. While still students, he and Ruppersberg operated a storefront gallery, and he remembers late-night visits from Walter Hopps. He also talks about teachers like Emerson Woelffer and the day Marcel Duchamp visited his art history class.

In 1920s Germany, Galka Scheyer began championing recent painting by artists she dubbed The Blue Four: Alexej Jawlensky, Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger, and Wassily Kandinsky. A decade later, Scheyer was settled in Los Angeles, a Weimar Auntie Mame tirelessly promoting modern art and its capacity to alter lives and transform attitudes. Her collection, the first important collection of German modernism in Southern California, is now known around the world.