Peace is breaking out in Davis.

Peace messages will flash on an outside wall of the Varsity Theater, greet commuters inside Unitrans buses, be broadcast over Davis Community Television, and appear on posters in businesses, from a toy store to a yoga studio, from Sept. 27 through Nov. 25 as part of the UC Davis Design Museum's "Peace Begins Here" exhibit, supported by a $2,000 grant from the City of Davis Arts Contract Program.

The Design Museum, which proposed and organized the eight-week "Peace Begins Here" exhibit, will display 11 large peace commercials on its own walls and show another 89 on a looping video. On Oct. 7, the museum will invite the community to a free talk by Josh Chen, whose San Francisco-based design firm produced all 100 peace ads. A reception with the artist, also free and open to the public, will follow.

"Peace Begins Here" showcases designs from Chen's 2003 book, "Peace: 100 Ideas," co-authored by David Krieger. Krieger, president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, came up with 100 ideas to promote a more peaceful world -- from "forgive someone from your past" to "work for an international ban on land mines" -- while Chen and his team of designers at Chen Design Associates used collages, drawings, information graphics, paintings and photographs to illustrate the ideas.

"We want to spread the message of peace throughout Davis," said John Fulton, the museum's exhibition coordinator.

Eighty of the messages will flash in rotation on the outside wall above the Varsity Theater's box office, alongside its neon marquee, from dusk until the theater's closing every evening throughout the exhibition. The city-owned, 1950s-vintage Art Deco theater, located at 616 Second St. in Davis, shows art-house films and hosts community lectures and fundraisers.

Calls for peace will also be displayed inside 40 Unitrans buses -- a different message on each bus -- from Sept. 27 through early December. Unitrans, a student-run transit system operated as a partnership of the Associated Students of UC Davis and the city of Davis, carries more than 3 million riders a year on a fleet that includes historic London double-deckers.

Davis Community Television, a volunteer-run cable network available on Comcast channel 15, will broadcast all 100 messages on its Community Bulletin Board during the course of the eight-week exhibit.

Davis businesses, including the Alphabet Moon toy store at 235 F St. and The Bo Tree Yoga Center at 817 Fourth St. have volunteered to display peace signs in their shops.

The Design Museum, located in Walker Hall, is open from noon to 4 p.m. weekdays and 2 to 4 p.m. Sundays. Chen's Oct. 7 artist talk will take place at 1:30 p.m. in Everson Hall. The reception will follow at the Design Museum.

For more information, visit: http://designmuseum.ucdavis.edu/.

The Design Museum is one of three art museums on the UC Davis campus. Its last exhibit featured embroidery by an artist who learned to stitch while in prison, using yarn he unraveled from old socks. The last campus-town exhibit, organized by the Richard L. Nelson Gallery at UC Davis, brought performance art, a science fiction landscape and free ice cream to the Southern Pacific Depot in Davis this spring.

Information about current exhibits at the Nelson is available at http://nelsongallery.ucdavis.edu/. Exhibit information for the C.N. Gorman Museum, one of the only museums in the country that specializes in contemporary art by Native American and other indigenous peoples, is available at: http://gormanmuseum.ucdavis.edu/.