My Entire Childhood
OPENING RECEPTION FOR THE ARTIST: June 20, 5:00-8:00 PM. Dates and times subject to change. Please sign our guest list to receive the latest updates about this exhibition.
Marc Kreisel has been known to brush off admiration with a dry aside: “Yeah, yeah. I know—I’m a cultural icon.” The remark lands as both deflection and fact.
In the early 1970s, long before it was fashionable, Kreisel was living and working in a downtown Los Angeles loft, developing a hybrid practice that combined photography, collage, and paint. At the time, Los Angeles lacked a discernible creative center—a place where artists could gather, exchange ideas, and build momentum. The city’s cultural energy was dispersed across thousands of square miles.
Kreisel saw this not simply as a condition, but as material.
My Entire Childhood – mixed media
In 1979, he found the American Hotel for sale downtown and recognized its potential. He quickly assembled a group of backers and acquired it. Inspired in part by Joseph Beuys’ Honey Pump, he conceived of the building as a kind of “money pump”—a self-sustaining system in which artists could live, work, and support one another, both economically and creatively.
Soon the rooms filled with painters, photographers, sculptors, and poets. The hotel’s ground-floor lounge, Al’s Bar, quickly became the gravitational center of a growing, cross-disciplinary community as musicians joined the artists living upstairs. What began as a largely insular artists’ gathering place soon drew wider attention, and before long, lines formed outside for performances that would become part of Los Angeles cultural lore.
Over the next two decades, Kreisel remained the central force behind Al’s Bar and, more broadly, the emergence of the downtown Los Angeles Arts District. Artists clustered around the American Hotel, activating surrounding blocks and establishing a creative density the city had previously lacked.
Throughout this period, Kreisel sustained his studio practice while also extending it—treating the American Hotel itself as an evolving work shaped over time through people, exchange, and proximity.
Bridge – mixed media
He championed the artists he believed in—collecting their work, trading, and providing opportunities for visibility. He opened American Gallery nearby to exhibit their work and help introduce it to a wider audience.
After the American Hotel was sold and Al’s Bar closed, Kreisel continued to develop his work with renewed focus. Decades later, he opened Musée du Al, anchored by the collection he had built over years of engagement with the artists around him. The museum extends his original ambition: to support artists by creating context, visibility, and continuity.
Peace – mixed media
On the occasion of the museum’s first anniversary, Musée du Al presents My Entire Childhood, a retrospective spanning more than 45 years of Kreisel’s work. The exhibition traces a practice defined less by premeditation than by instinct—where photography and painting converge through acts of selection, juxtaposition, and improvisation.
Seen in this light, Kreisel’s reputation as a cultural icon emerges not from any individual endeavor, but from a lifelong practice grounded in a singular sensibility—one that works without a fixed plan and allows form—whether image, space, or community—to emerge through doing.