David Byrne Takes the Stairs

At the Pace gallery in Chelsea in early April, the artist and musician David Byrne was in a stairwell, lying on the floor and drawing on the wall with a black acrylic marker. Byrne, who is seventy-two, wore a buttoned-up navy polo shirt, a white wristwatch, and railroad-striped overalls. (“I thought, I have to dress like an artist today,” he said.) He finished inking a foot, said, “O.K., we’ve got hands to draw,” stood, and admired his creation: a mural showing a family of four with humanoid bodies—soft curves, rumpled clothes, neatly folded hands—and skyscrapers for heads. Byrne, who lives nearby, had been drawing in the stairwell all day. He was working from sketches he’d made, which Nate Kamp, an exhibition manager, projected onto the walls. Byrne finished the hands on a skyscraper-headed child, then asked, “What’s the next one? Oh, the one with the eyes?”

“I think the Eyes, yeah,” Kamp said.

“Whoa, boy,” Byrne said, in a here-we-go tone. He picked up a wooden stool and proceeded down to a third-floor landing.

Pace, founded by Arne Glimcher in 1960, and now run by his son Marc, opened its eight-story flagship building, designed by Bonetti/Kozerski Architecture, in 2019. Beauty and art abound—that day, Robert Indiana number sculptures adorned a sixth-floor terrace—but only recently in the stairwell. “I just thought, Oh, it would be fun to do something in the stairwell, because I take the stairs all the time, and they’re boring,” Lauren Panzo, a Pace vice-president, said. Gallerygoers often take the stairs, too; perhaps Byrne could liven them up. Panzo proposed the stairwell idea to Byrne, who had shown a whimsical tree-diagram mural and other drawings at Pace in 2022, and spot illustrations, or dingbats, in 2020. He was intrigued.

“I thought, Oh, people are really in close proximity to the walls when they go up or down,” Byrne recalled. “What if they were confronted by all these different kinds of people and creatures, each one at eye level, so when you get to the landing you’re looking right in their eyes?” This felt fun. He made some sketches, each a “little idea”: “Let’s make it a family, a couple and children, all with building heads.” Other ideas included a winking, arms-akimbo Accusatory Guy (floor 1); “two people dancing, but they’re all free-floating ovals” (floor 6.5); a strangely glamorous blob (floor 2.5); and Spiky Person (floor 3.5). “I showed the spiky drawing to someone and they said, ‘Oh, that’s a Russian bear-hunting outfit from the nineteenth century,’ ” Byrne said. He pulled up a photograph of a nail-infused leather outfit. (The costume, whose origins are mysterious, is at the Menil Collection.) Byrne’s Spiky Person is cuddlier—part hairy Ed Koren cartoon, part “Hellraiser.” He drew nine stairwell murals in all, which are now on display indefinitely.

On the landing, Kamp projected the next sketch: two faceless eyes, for “this slightly creepy or disturbing effect,” Byrne said. Marker squeaking loudly, he drew—eyes first, dark and intense, then a series of radiating lines, which evoked sunbeams, then tears, then eyelashes. “Wow,” Byrne said.

“I thought you were going to emulate bicycle spokes,” Kamp said. Byrne laughed, sounding startled. Then he drew crisscrossing lines across the original lines, which ended up looking like the Brooklyn Bridge, or a spiderweb—or, indeed, a bicycle wheel.

Byrne, a well-known cycling enthusiast, often has insights about his art after completing it. As a kid, he drew “rocket ships and spies”; as a teen, he drew surreal cartoons inspired by Zap Comix; in Talking Heads and beyond, he drew storyboards for music videos. During the pandemic, alone at home, he began drawing dingbats. “It was fun, but it was also a kind of therapy,” he said. “In retrospect, I could look at the stuff and go, Oh, look, the drawing’s about being trapped in your body or something—some body distortion.” He went on, “I thought, O.K., you’re unconsciously working through everything that’s happening during the pandemic.” He said that drawings often help to clarify ideas. “The astronomer Vera Rubin was mystified by this data she was getting from galaxies,” he said. “As soon as she did sketches, it revealed to her what was going on. She’s been credited with verifying or discovering dark matter.” He laughed. “And the late physicist Richard Feynman did these weird diagrams with arrows and squiggles and things. He found that it was much faster to think using the diagrams than to write out the whole mathematical formula for the way the electrons or whatever were moving—subatomic stuff. Once he could think with the diagram, he could go back to the math.”

Completing the Eyes, whose radiating lines extended to the wall’s edges, required some athleticism. Byrne stood on the stool, huffing like a tennis player, then lay on the floor, pushing off the wall like a swimmer. Finished, he stood, dusted off, and regarded the image. “It’s staring at me!” he said, happily. How did it feel? “Creepy!” ♦