California Institute of Abnormalarts
| CIA | |
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| Location | 11334 Burbank Boulevard, North Hollywood, California 91601 |
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| Coordinates | 34°10′19″N 118°22′39″W / 34.17198°N 118.37742°WCoordinates: 34°10′19″N 118°22′39″W / 34.17198°N 118.37742°W |
| Owner | Carl Crew and Robert Ferguson |
| Type | Nightclub, museum |
| Opened | 2001 |
| Website | |
| www |
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The California Institute of Abnormalarts - also written as the California Institute of Abnormal Arts and abbreviated as CIA - is a nightclub and sideshow museum located in North Hollywood, California. Owned and operated by actor-screenwriter Carl Crew and Robert Ferguson, the venue primarily hosts underground musical groups, performance art, movie screenings and sideshow acts including burlesque and freak shows.
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 features 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, displays 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 be 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 remains at the CIA to present day in a hermetically sealed glass coffin, the body itself embalmed with arsenic. Chatouilleu's corpse is such a prominent fixture of the CIA that the LA Weekly newspaper ranked the venue in its "Best of LA 2006" list as "Best Place to Find a Dead Clown".
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