The California Institute of Abnormalarts - also written as the California Institute of Abnormal Arts and abbreviated as CIA - was a nightclub and sideshow museum located in North Hollywood, California. Owned and operated by actor-screenwriter Carl Crew and Robert Ferguson, the venue primarily hosted underground musical groups, performance art, movie screenings and sideshow acts including burlesque
- Venue
- California Institute of Abnormalarts
- Town
- Los Angeles, US
The California Institute of Abnormalarts - also written as the California Institute of Abnormal Arts and abbreviated as CIA - was a nightclub and sideshow museum located in North Hollywood, California. Owned and operated by actor-screenwriter Carl Crew and Robert Ferguson, the venue primarily hosted underground musical groups, performance art, movie screenings and sideshow acts including burlesque and freak shows. The club closed in July 2022. Owners Carl Crew and Robert Ferguson befriended each other while they were both working as apprentice embalmers in a Los Angeles mortuary in the 1980s. In 1994, the two opened the CIA as a clandestine location for underground bands and performance art, obtaining a dilapidated building in the North Hollywood district which once served as a recording studio during the 1970s. In the late 1990s, the CIA was raided by police and ultimately shut down for serving liquor without a license; the venue remained out of operation for three years until Crew and Ferguson re-opened it in 2001 with its current sideshow-themed aesthetic. The CIA featured an extensive collection of sideshow memorabilia that Crew and Ferguson, both avid fans and historians of the American sideshow, had collected over the years. The venue, painted with bright, garish circus colors, displayed cryptotaxidermy, pickled punks and vintage banners for sideshow attractions and over the years has featured such oddities and hoaxes as a Fiji mermaid, the skull of "the world's smallest Freemason", the severed head of Sasquatch, the severed arm of Claude de Lorraine and a fairy skeleton. The CIA's most notable attraction, however, may have been the preserved corpse of Achile Chatouilleu, an American circus performer who died in 1912 and requested his body be put on display in the clown makeup and attire he had worn throughout his life. Although Crew leased the body for six months in 2002, he claims that the owners "forgot" to retrieve it and the corpse remained at the CIA in