February 12, 2026

ArtCenter College Of Design Presents– Dave Muller: Proto Typical– Solo Exhibition

Featuring the return of Muller’s interactive record store installation,
Record Pavilion 2.0

On view March 14 - August 8, 2026
In the College’s Alyce de Roulet Williamson Gallery

Opening Reception: March 14, 5–7:00 p.m.

Los Angeles, CA – ArtCenter College of Design announces Dave Muller: Proto Typical, a new exhibition presenting more than two decades of work by the Los Angeles-based artist. Featuring a range of multimedia works from the early 2000s to the present, the exhibition features watercolors, drawings, temporary murals and installations illuminating Muller’s lifelong fascination with music and its power to shape identity and culture.

Renowned for his site-specific installations, Muller meticulously portrays the innumerable icons of his musical obsessions. His chosen subjects include album covers and spines, vinyl records, tapes, CDs, bootlegs, B-sides, disco balls, record labels, set lists, posters, books, music store price tags, rare and popular instruments, and more.

Dave Muller: Proto Typical represents a homecoming for the artist as it reveals the vibrant cultural landscape of his L.A. roots. A centerpiece of the exhibition is the re-installation of Record Pavilion 2.0 (2022-2025), a functional record store, throughout the duration of the show. Muller will also debut a new work based on the College’s iconic orange dot logo, a nod to his own history and knowledge of ArtCenter. With his individual talent, curiosity and wit, this exhibition marks Muller’s first non-profit solo presentation in Los Angeles in over 20 years.

Integral to Muller’s emergence as an artist in the 1990s was formation of Three Day Weekend, a series of nomadic social art events held over holiday weekends that began in Los Angeles and expanded to major cities globally. Simultaneously he began making watercolor announcements for these and for exhibitions featuring his contemporaries—a body of work that would also later involve canonical artists, designers, and exhibitions. In a 2001 Artforum feature, Ralph Rugoff wrote that the project “raises questions about the complex relationship between artmaking and generosity.” Rugoff continued, “laced with sly reversals and slippery humor, his work engages the myriad ways in which artistic identity is mediated by the rhetoric of publicity, a process that involves enough territorial trespassing and code scrambling to keep us in a state of critical bemusement.” As for the legacy of Three Day Weekend, it not only provided exhibition opportunities to young artists, but also served as a vital model for prioritizing community, particularly among the characteristically disconnected sprawl of Los Angeles.

Individualistic yet also tapping into a shared commonality, Muller’s works serve as much more than mere illustrations or tributes. While his appropriated images may on the surface appear as mimicry, their hand-drawn quality, and their rich, uneven washes of color and serpentine lines, stand in contrast to the slickness of digital imagery. The painstaking deliberateness with which Muller renders his watercolors, drawings, and paintings, along with his continued embrace of DIY, runs counter to the ever current and inundating onslaught of digital reproduction. To view the artist’s work over a 20 year period—a span wherein image technologies have most rapidly accelerated—reminds us of the essential value of artmaking. With the current conversation regarding the threats of AI, we still crave the artist’s hand.

Dave Muller is a Los Angeles-based conceptual artist, born in 1964 in San Francisco, California. He received a BA in chemistry and art from the University of California at Davis in 1989, where he also served as a DJ and Music Director at KDVS. He briefly studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York before earning an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia in 1993. His work has been presented in the United States and internationally including solo exhibitions at the recently closed Blum & Poe Gallery in Los Angeles; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; and the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, Spain. Important group exhibitions include the Whitney Biennial (2004) and Sympathy for the Devil: Art and Rock and Roll Since 1967 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (2007). Muller’s work is represented in the public collections of the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario; among others.

EXHIBITION DATES & OPENING RECEPTION

Dave Muller: Proto Typical
March 14 – August 8, 2026
Alyce de Roulet Williamson Gallery
ArtCenter College of Design, Hillside Campus
1700 Lida Street, Pasadena, CA 91103

Gallery Hours: Wednesday – Saturday | Noon–5 p.m.
Admission is FREE

Opening Reception (With the Artist)
Saturday, March 14, 2026, 5–7:00 p.m.

Exhibition Walk-Through (With the Artist)
Saturday, March 14, 2026, 4-5 p.m.

A sneak peek of the exhibition will be part of Pasadena Art Night on Friday, March 13.

About ArtCenter Exhibitions
ArtCenter Exhibitions includes the Alyce de Roulet Williamson Gallery at the Hillside Campus in Pasadena above the Rose Bowl, the Peter and Merle Mullin Gallery, the Hoffmitz Milken Center for Typography Gallery and the Hutto-Patterson Exhibition Hall at the South Campus a mile from Old Pasadena. These curated spaces embody ArtCenter's institutional will to understand artistic thinking and design strategies as levers in promoting social advancement, the pursuit of humanitarian innovation, and the use of critical inquiry to clarify objectives and truths. Using the lens of contemporary art and design, the mission of ArtCenter Exhibitions is to ignite emotional resonance, provoke intellectual dissonance and conjure unexpected pathways of thinking.

About ArtCenter College of Design
Founded in 1930 and located in Pasadena, California, ArtCenter College of Design is a global leader in art and design education. With a mission to educate, inspire and empower creative and design leaders, the College is renowned for its undergraduate and graduate degree programs spanning industrial design, media and technology, as well as visual and applied arts. With deep industry relationships, state-of-the-art facilities and a strong faculty roster, ArtCenter provides real-world experience aligned with industry needs. Through rigorous, hands-on, practitioner-led instruction, the College prepares students for meaningful creative careers. For nearly 100 years, ArtCenter alumni and faculty have shaped many of the world’s most iconic products, vehicles, campaigns and creative works, leaving a lasting impact across art, design and culture.

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