LOS ANGELES — This weekend, LA’s newest — and, allegedly, smallest — museum will open its doors to the public. Located on a quiet residential street in Echo Park, Musée du Al is the creation of Marc Kreisel, who founded Al’s Bar, a legendary watering hole and hub for artists and musicians, in pre-gentrification downtown LA. Showcasing an eclectic range of artists mostly from Kreisel’s own collection, the first exhibition offers a glimpse into the creative milieu centered around this influential but under-recognized art space.
Al’s Bar was housed in the American Hotel, a run-down, four-story building Kreisel purchased with two friends in 1979. He was inspired in part by Joseph Beuys’s “Honey Pump at the Workplace,” a 1977 installation at Documenta 6 that involved pumping honey through tubes around a museum. Kreisel’s vision was to create a “money pump” for artists, “a place where artists could circulate money.”
“It was about artists living and working there,” Coleen Sterritt, an artist who was a bookkeeper at the American Hotel in its early days, told Hyperallergic. Well before “social practice” was a widely-used artspeak term, Sterritt said, “Kreisel was really living it. It was genuine, not a strategy.”
Located on Traction Avenue in what is now the Arts District, the hotel also included a bar on the ground floor, which became one of LA’s first punk venues. Kreisel hired others to book bands at Al’s Bar, including Michael Reilly, an Irishman with music business experience who was renting a room upstairs and who brought in local acts like the Latino punk band The Plugz, performance artist Johanna Went, and FEAR, alongside touring bands including Australian industrial group SPK (Surgical Penis Klinik). “I didn’t know what punk was, I thought I was gonna get killed!” Kreisel told Hyperallergic of his first encounter with FEAR. “They played a great set!” In the ensuing years, music icons such as Tool, Nirvana, Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Beck would grace the stage.
Although Kreisel wasn’t part of the punk scene, he recognized the vitality and sense of community it brought. “One of the things I appreciate about Mark, he’s totally open to whatever happens,” Kevin Walker, an artist and musician whose old band, Fender Buddies, was one of the first to play Al’s Bar, told Hyperallergic. “Mark is like, ‘Let’s do it and see.’ That’s the whole ethos of Al’s Bar: Let the lunatics take over the asylum.”
The Hotel also housed the American Gallery, where Kreisel and others organized shows, featuring primarily friends and artists who had begun to move downtown, drawn by cheap rents and large spaces. Despite its location smack-dab in a nascent cultural hotbed, the Gallery was largely ignored by the established LA art scene, concentrated at the time on the Westside, in Venice, or along La Cienega Boulevard.
“The American Gallery was not really acknowledged by the art world at large, we were invisible,” Katy Crowe, an artist who curated shows there, told Hyperallergic. “It just felt like a backwater, even though artists lived down there.”
Despite the historical oversight, Kreisel’s enterprise has achieved a degree of posthumous recognition, notably by the University of California, Los Angeles, which acquired the archives for the American Hotel and Al’s Bar in 2015.
Since Al’s Bar closed in 2001, Kreisel has been quietly working on his own art, which combines expressionistic painting and photography, in the studio behind his house. After a recent ill-fated meeting with a gallerist, he was inspired to open his own space. He transformed his studio into a modest white box, hung a neon sign reading “Musée du Al” outside, and the museum was born.
The inaugural show (RSVP for address), opening this Saturday, April 19 with a performance by Miss Art World, features work by artists who exhibited at the American Gallery or hung out at Al’s. Most are from Kreisel’s collection, including “Clavo” (1981), John Valadez’s pastel portrait of a Chicano youth wearing high-waisted trousers and a tank top, Kreisel’s first acquisition. (“It took me two years to pay it off,” he recalled.)
Also on view are a photorealistic watercolor of a meat hammer by Gary Lloyd, a pensive assemblage by the late Kenzi Shiokava, Brad Wong’s “Steam-Powered Wheelchair,” and works by Sterritt, Crowe, Walker, Beuys, Joe Potts, Allen Ruppersberg, and Kreisel himself, including “Peace” (2025), a mixed-media painting that incorporates photos of the heavily graffitied walls at Al’s. Future shows will focus on women artists in LA, followed by Latinx artists.
When asked what he hoped the public response to the Musée du Al would be, Kreisel responded plainly, “They can take away what they want, that’s personal, but I just want them to come and see the work. That’s all.”