Artist
David Byrne
Via New York, NY, USA
David Byrne is internationally renowned as the musician who co-founded the groundbreaking Talking Heads (1976-88)—a band that took popular music in new directions. He has won an Obie for theater work, Academy and Golden Globe awards for his music and a Moon Man for videos. Byrne has also been involved with photography and design since his college days and has been publishing his work for many years. His artwork is often described as elevating the mundane or the banal to the level of art, creating icons out of everyday materials to find the sacred in the profane. In 2008, Creative Time presented Byrne’s "Playing the Building," a 9,000-square-foot, interactive, site-specific installation that transformed the interior of Lower Manhattan’s landmark Battery Maritime Building into a massive sound sculpture for visitors to “play.”
Byrne is the author of several books, each a kind of piece on its own. Among his recent books are Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information (Steidl/PaceMacGill, 2003), which focuses on his use of the presentation software PowerPoint as an art medium and contains a DVD of five PowerPoint presentations set to music. Bicycle Diaries (Viking, 2009) chronicles Byrne’s observations and insights as he pedals through and engages with some of the world’s major cities. He also released an audio book version of Bicycle Diaries complete with street sounds, narration and music. Byrne’s most recent book, How Music Works, is just out in paperback.
