ArtNight Closeup: Pasadena Artist Opens a Record Store Inside a Gallery

A functioning record store opens Saturday inside the Alyce de Roulet Williamson Gallery at ArtCenter College of Design, anchoring a solo exhibition that spans more than two decades of work by Dave Muller, a Los Angeles-based artist who has lived in Pasadena for roughly 20 years.

The exhibition, “Dave Muller: Proto Typical,” gets a public sneak peek Friday night during ArtNight Pasadena, the citywide arts event produced by the City of Pasadena’s Cultural Affairs Division, before its formal opening reception Saturday from 5 to 7 p.m. An artist-led walk-through precedes the reception from 4 to 5 p.m. The show runs through August 8. Admission is free.

At the center of the exhibition is Record Pavilion 2.0, a fully operational record store stocked with vinyl from Muller’s personal collection. Visitors can browse and buy records throughout the show’s run. Muller routinely restocks the inventory during his exhibitions, according to gallery records from previous installations. His taste runs wide — asked whether he favors a particular genre, Muller said, “No, I’m very Catholic in my taste.”

“I think that I’ve always found myself at home at record stores,” Muller said in a recorded interview. “Trying to come up with a version of that that I would like to exist in, which is sort of what I do with everything I make, is sort of why I might have gone to start to do that.”

Record Pavilion 2.0 was first shown in Los Angeles at Blum & Poe gallery in 2022 and appeared at Anthony Meier Fine Arts in Mill Valley in late 2024. At ArtCenter, the installation sits alongside Muller’s watercolors, drawings, temporary murals, and installations — hand-rendered depictions of album covers, vinyl records, cassettes, bootlegs, set lists, and instruments.

Muller will also debut a new work based on ArtCenter’s orange dot logo, according to the college’s press release.

The exhibition marks Muller’s first nonprofit solo presentation in Los Angeles in over 20 years, according to ArtCenter’s press release. His work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Dallas Museum of Art, and the National Gallery of Canada. He was included in the 2004 Whitney Biennial.

Muller, born in 1964 in San Francisco, earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry and art from the University of California at Davis, where he also served as a DJ and music director at KDVS, the campus radio station. He earned a master of fine arts from the California Institute of the Arts in 1993. In the 1990s, he began organizing Three Day Weekend, a series of nomadic social art events held over holiday weekends that started in Los Angeles and spread to cities including Tokyo, Berlin, Vienna, and London.

He describes the threads running through his work in musical terms. “You know the way a folk song, kind of like different people play the folk song and they do their own thing with it,” Muller said. “So there’s some kind of version of authorship that’s kind of both your own and shared in different ways.”

Asked about the rising cost of studio space in Los Angeles, Muller said he considers himself fortunate. “I’m very lucky that I bought a house like 20 years ago in Pasadena and I have my studio in a garage out in the backyard,” he said. “I think it’s just harder and harder in the artistic field to be able to find the situations I have found.”

The record store began, in part, as a practical matter. Muller said he used to sell surplus vinyl to stores like Amoeba Records but found the payoff minimal. “What I’m really trying to do is turn some version of lemons into lemonade where it’s a fun place to hang out and you would like to be there,” he said.

Muller said the most successful art shows he visits are the ones that make him want to do something afterward. “If people left feeling like they want to do something, great,” he said.

ArtNight Pasadena takes place Friday, March 13, from 6 to 10 p.m., with free admission to 19 participating venues connected by free shuttle service. The Williamson Gallery is at ArtCenter’s Hillside Campus, 1700 Lida St., Pasadena. Regular gallery hours are Wednesday through Saturday, noon to 5 p.m. Reservations are recommended. Information: artcenter.edu/about/exhibitions/dave-muller-proto-typical.html. ArtNight information: ArtNightPasadena.org or (626) 744-7887.

“If nothing else,” Muller said, “maybe at some point I’ve always dreamed of being a person behind the counter in a record store.”