Al's Grand Hotel Catalog

Beginning in the 1960s, select Los Angeles artists began to mimic the look and feel of commercial marketing strategies by treating viewers as consumers. Allen Ruppersberg ran Al’s Grand Hotel, an art project that doubled as a fully-functional hotel, located at 7175 Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, for a little over a month in 1971. Individual rooms in the two-story craftsman-style house in Hollywood were redecorated in various styles, such as the Jesus Room and the Bridal Suite. This Zine is a reprint of the original Al’s Grand Hotel Catalog first published in 1971.

Allen Ruppersberg (born 1944) was raised in suburban Cleveland and became interested in animation and commercial art after visiting Disneyland as a young boy. He graduated from the Chouinard Art Institute in 1967 and initially worked as a painter. He soon became fascinated with pulp fiction novels, magazines, posters, and films – the stuff of everyday life and culture – and made them the content and form of his work. He participated in the groundbreaking 1969 exhibition When Attitudes Become Form, curated by Harald Szeeman at Kunsthalle Bern and is recognized as a seminal practitioner of installation art, having produced such influential works as Al's Cafe (1969), Al’s Grand Hotel (1971) and The Novel that Writes Itself (1978).