LOS ANGELES — This weekend, LA’s latest — and, allegedly, smallest — museum will open its doorways to the general public. Situated on a quiet residential avenue in Echo Park, Musée du Al is the creation of Marc Kreisel, who based Al’s Bar, a legendary watering gap and hub for artists and musicians, in pre-gentrification downtown LA. Showcasing an eclectic vary of artists principally from Kreisel’s personal assortment, the primary exhibition gives a glimpse into the artistic milieu centered round this influential however under-recognized artwork house.
Al’s Bar was housed within the American Lodge, a run-down, four-story constructing Kreisel bought with two pals in 1979. He was impressed partly by Joseph Beuys’s “Honey Pump at the Workplace,” a 1977 set up at Documenta 6 that concerned pumping honey by way of tubes round a museum. Kreisel’s imaginative and prescient 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 on the American Lodge in its early days, instructed Hyperallergic. Nicely earlier than “social practice” was a widely-used artspeak time period, Sterritt mentioned, “Kreisel was really living it. It was genuine, not a strategy.”
American Lodge, former website of Al’s Bar, 2025 (photograph by Matt Stromberg / Hyperallergic)
Situated on Traction Avenue in what’s now the Arts District, the resort additionally included a bar on the bottom ground, which turned one in every of LA’s first punk venues. Kreisel employed others to guide bands at Al’s Bar, together with Michael Reilly, an Irishman with music enterprise expertise who was renting a room upstairs and who introduced in native acts just like the Latino punk band The Plugz, efficiency artist Johanna Went, and FEAR, alongside touring bands together with Australian industrial group SPK (Surgical Penis Klinik). “I didn’t know what punk was, I thought I was gonna get killed!” Kreisel instructed Hyperallergic of his first encounter with FEAR. “They played a great set!” Within the ensuing years, music icons comparable to Device, Nirvana, Pink Scorching Chili Peppers, and Beck would grace the stage.
Though Kreisel wasn’t a part of the punk scene, he acknowledged the vitality and sense of group it introduced. “One of the things I appreciate about Mark, he’s totally open to whatever happens,” Kevin Walker, an artist and musician whose outdated band, Fender Buddies, was one of many first to play Al’s Bar, instructed Hyperallergic.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.”
Mark Kreisel in entrance of Al’s Bar, undated (photograph by Gary Leonard, courtesy Kevin Walker)
The Lodge additionally housed the American Gallery, the place Kreisel and others organized exhibits, that includes primarily pals and artists who had begun to maneuver downtown, drawn by low-cost rents and huge areas. Regardless of its location smack-dab in a nascent cultural hotbed, the Gallery was largely ignored by the established LA artwork scene, concentrated on the time on the Westside, in Venice, or alongside 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 exhibits there, instructed Hyperallergic. “It just felt like a backwater, even though artists lived down there.”
Exhibitions on the American Gallery c. 1989-1990: Kenzi Shiokava sculptures (left) and Pam Goldbloom and Jeffery Kaisershot (proper) (pictures courtesy Katy Crowe)
Regardless of the historic oversight, Kreisel’s enterprise has achieved a level of posthumous recognition, notably by the College of California, Los Angeles, which acquired the archives for the American Lodge and Al’s Bar in 2015.
Since Al’s Bar closed in 2001, Kreisel has been quietly engaged on his personal artwork, which mixes expressionistic portray and images, within the studio behind his home. After a current ill-fated assembly with a gallerist, he was impressed to open his personal house. He reworked his studio right into a modest white field, hung a neon signal studying “Musée du Al” outdoors, and the museum was born.
Works within the Musée du Al’s inaugural present: Gary Lloyd, “Meat Hammer (color)” (left) and Merwin Belin, “America, Its Folklore” (proper)
The inaugural present (RSVP for tackle), opening this Saturday, April 19 with a efficiency by Miss Artwork World, options work by artists who exhibited on the American Gallery or frolicked at Al’s. Most are from Kreisel’s assortment, together with “Clavo” (1981), John Valadez’s pastel portrait of a Chicano youth carrying high-waisted trousers and a tank high, Kreisel’s first acquisition. (“It took me two years to pay it off,” he recalled.)
Additionally 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, together with “Peace” (2025), a mixed-media portray that includes pictures of the closely graffitied partitions at Al’s. Future exhibits will give attention to ladies artists in LA, adopted by Latinx artists.
When requested what he hoped the general public response to the Musée du Al can 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.”
