David Sederberg presents the Olympia Art Museum pop-up during Arts Walk

Dave Sederberg is known around town for the outdoor installations that have been popping up to illuminate Olympia since the dark days of the pandemic.

But if you don’t know Sederberg, who owns Pacific Stage and has long been a supporter of the Procession of the Species, you might not know that he’s been making art for some 45 years.

For Arts Walk, happening Friday, Oct. 3, and Saturday, Oct. 4, Sederberg has created another installation: He calls it the Olympia Art Museum, and it’s presenting a retrospective of his work, shown under his full name, David Mollari Sederberg. Or to put it another way, Sederberg is presenting the museum.

“It works both ways,” he said with delight during a recent interview at Pacific Stage, the lighting, sound and video business he owns and runs. (To be precise, the interview happened above the business in Ten Forward, an art-filled apartment/meeting area named for the bar on “Star Trek: The Next Generation.”)

“I’m going to have installation pieces in my installation, and there’s one installation piece that’s going to have another installation piece intermixed with it, so that will be an installation within an installation within an installation,” he added.

As you might have guessed already, Sederberg has a charming geekiness. He loves puns — both verbal and visual. Though the “museum” will exist for just over 24 hours, it has a catchphrase: “There’s no place like OAM.”

The earliest pieces in the show, elaborate paintings done on car hoods, include one called “Starry Knight” that’s a takeoff on Vincent Van Gogh. (capital V or small?)

“The Sleeping Greener,” a parody of Henri Rousseau’s “The Sleeping Gypsy,” shows a student at The Evergreen State College slumbering near not a lion but a geoduck (the school mascot).

The hoods grew out of Sederberg’s job working for his brother, Bernie Sederberg of Bernie’s Body Shop. It was there that he got into airbrushing. He began doing the hoods meant to be hung on walls when he grew tired of painting the “monsters and scantily clad women” that many customers wanted on their cars.

In 1997, he began building and painting metal sculptures including “Moodusa,” a cow with snakes growing out of its head, and “Queen Tut,” a gay Egyptian deity.

“I did those for a while and then I had a kid,” he said. “She was the most important art project.” He beams when he talks about daughter Whitney Sederberg, now 21 and a senior studying literature and writing at New York University.

In 2020, when COVID put his business on hold and Whitney was in high school, Dave Sederberg dove into designing outdoor installations, starting with “Glowhenge,” structures painted with fluorescent paint and lit with black light. Most of the installations have been collaborations with others — including Whitney.

Though he’s shown at the Palm Springs Art Museum and the Bellevue Art Museum and won awards including first place at the Edmonds Art Festival. Sederberg prefers to think of himself as an amateur. “ ‘Amateur’ means for the love,” he said. “That’s the exact translation. I do art for the love, not to compete, not to sell. I do what I want.”

The exception, of course, is the projects he does for clients at Pacific Stage. Even there, though, he often is working from his own concepts on videos and set pieces. “It’s fun,” he said.

Along the way, his creative endeavors have included Procession of the Species, with which he got involved in the early 2000s. In 2018, he built the skunk that has become a procession fixture.

Back in 1985, he started Olympia’s Polar Bear Swim Club, which met on New Year’s Day at Capitol Lake for more than two decades before the swim became an offering of Lacey Parks.

And along the way, he’s done silly things just for his — and his family’s — amusement. “One year I rented a Mayflower moving truck, and we had Thanksgiving in there,” he said.

Olympia Art Museum: David Mollari Sederberg

What: Sederberg is behind both the “museum” — an Arts Walk pop-up — and the retrospective, showing highlights of his 45 years of art making, including collaborations.

When: 5-10 p.m. Friday, Oct. 3, and noon-6 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 4

Where: The Olympia Ballroom, 116 Legion Way SE, Olympia

More information: http://mollariart.com

This story was originally published October 3, 2025 at 5:00 AM.