Artist Ed Ruscha With Owen Wilson

When Owen Wilson was in his 20s and in Los Angeles to film scenes for his breakout 1996 movie Bottle Rocket, he went to The Ivy at the Shore and saw a painting by Ed Ruscha, famed for his landscape and text-based works that cast a deadpan eye on Southern California’s man-made environment.

"Me and my brothers and Wes [Anderson] would go to The Ivy at the Shore when my parents came to visit," recalls Wilson, "and they had a great big painting that said, 'Brave Men Run in My Family.' We all loved that, my dad in particular. That always stuck in my mind.

Owen Wilson

Within a few years, the actor, who next appears in Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel, fell into the art world’s gravitational pull, becoming friends with New York gallerist and artist Tony Shafrazi, hitting the Art Basel Miami Beach art fair regularly and collecting works by Cady Noland, Donald Judd and Andy Warhol.

Ed Ruscha

Wilson met Ruscha through artist Tony Shafrazi, and the actor not only has acquired three of his works, but the two have become friends. (Ruscha and his wife, Danna, got Wilson into Breaking Bad.) One of his Ruscha pieces, a painting of a mountain, is called The Celluloid Light Projection, a Ruscha-ism for a movie.

Ed Ruscha

Once, says Wilson, "Ed knew I was going off to make a movie and he said, 'Good luck on your celluloid light projection.' I always thought that was a funny thing to call a movie."

Artist Sam Falls and Orlando Bloom

"Dude, this is so f—ing cool," pronounces Bloom of an artwork by Falls — sections of an umbrella, left to weather in Topanga Canyon for a year, then stitched to pieces of an unfaded umbrella for contrast. It's art created by nature. "An animal could take a dump on it," jokes Bloom, getting a laugh from Falls. The artist presents a more sober explanation: "It's about the time it's outside, representing a place and a sense of aging, a very melancholy thing." Bloom has been collecting Falls' work since January 2012, when he visited the LA Art Show and gravitated toward a photo of tires, laden with thick circles of paint depicting the same tires.

Artist Jonas Wood and HBO’s Michael Lombardo

Repped by David Kordansky gallery in L.A., Wood (left) has received acclaim in recent years for paintings of modernist, plant-strewn interiors and trading-card athletes. Lombardo, initially drawn to Wood's interior paintings when he became an admirer about four years ago, now recognizes the transcendent quality of his sports portraits. "I am not a sports fan," says Lombardo, "but I think the athlete paintings are powerful and poetic. I don't see them as art for sports fans. I see them as powerful portraits of dynamic people."

Jonas Wood and Michael Lombardo

The vibrancy of Wood's traditional, nonathlete portraits — of a poker player, suburban family, hipster couple, some of them people whom the artist personally knows — recalls a wide range of influences, from Henri Matisse to Lucian Freud to David Hockney.

Jonas Wood and Michael Lombardo

"The part of choosing someone to paint like a relative has more emotion and history to it," says Wood, whose Robin with Juba is a portrait of his mother (who has since died) holding a parrot.

Jonas Wood and Michael Lombardo

Lombardo saw Wood's Robin with Juba piece before it went on the market, and says, "It tells a story and has a personal dimension that I am enormously moved by."

Artist Amanda Ross-Ho and CAA’s Thao Nguyen

A longtime agent at CAA representing such architects as Rem Koolhaas and Cameron Sinclair and designers such as Dror Benshetrit and Yves Behar, Nguyen took over the revamp of the agency's art collection nearly 12 years ago. "We began the collection at CAA focusing on arts education and art that was being made in Southern California," explains Nguyen. She spearheads CAA's Angel Art benefit auction, which this year raised $1.1 million for Project Angel Food, and continues to add emerging artists to her own collection, including Ross-Ho, whose pieces Nguyen has been collecting since the two met in 2006.

Producer David Hoberman and Symbolic Action Founder Dean Valentine

Hoberman (left) and Valentine in the Hammer Museums lobby with Heavy Trails by Maya Hayuk. In 2007, Valentine donated more than 50 sculptures by Los Angeles-based artists to the museum. Something that was a private passion should become a public good; says Valentine. "That now can be shared by thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions of people for free. … Unless you have a home that is 70,000 square feet; not possible to show some of this work, so I just thought it was a way to really have an impact on the Los Angeles art community by giving this gift.

Unique Features Co-Founders Michael Lynne and Bob Shaye

Lynne (left) and Shaye at their offices in front of Gary Simmons' painting of a burning Hollywood sign. "Michael is the real collector," says Shaye. "A collector has more than 10 percent of the art they own in storage. I have less than 1 percent in storage, which makes me more of a decorator."