David Edward Byrd Biography
David Edward Byrd was born in 1941 in the United States and is a successful graphic artist, designer, illustrator and painter. He is best known for his rock posters, which helped define the look of rock and roll music starting in the 1960s. After graduating from Miami Beach High School in 1959, Byrd attended Boston Museum School for a year and then Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he earned a BFA in painting and design in 1964 and an MFA in painting and engraving in 1966.
Between 1970 and 1979, Byrd taught at Pratt Institute and the School of Visual Arts. Subsequently, he was again invited to Carnegie-Mellon to complete his graduate work. In 1968, he was given the chance to create rock posters for the newly opened Fillmore East Ballroom in Manhattan's East Village, thanks to the encouragement of some college classmates and rock promoter Bill Graham. Working in collaboration with Fantasy Unlimited, Byrd designed posters for many rock music legends such as Jimi Hendrix, Iron Butterfly, Jefferson Airplane, Ravi Shankar, Traffic and The Rolling Stones. His poster for Bill Graham's Jimi Hendrix Experience at the Fillmore East was voted #8 on Billboard Magazine's Top 25 Rock Posters. Byrd also created the original poster for the 1969 Woodstock festival, but his original design remained unused due to the event being moved and a failure to communicate with the artist on vacation on the Caribbean island of Saint Martin. During the 1970s, Byrd worked for the rock band KISS creating an individual poster for each solo album released by the band's four members.
Additionally, Byrd collaborated with The Who to create the poster for the rock opera Tommy, designing the poster for the band's 1971 performance at the Metropolitan Opera House. In 1981, Byrd moved to Los Angeles to work as art director for Van Halen's Fair Warning Tour and continued to create posters for theaters, opera houses, and the Pasadena playhouse. From 1991 to 2002, Byrd was a senior illustrator at Warner Brothers Creative Services, where he created illustrations, backgrounds and style guides for all Looney Tunes and Hanna-Barbera characters. Additionally, he worked with writer JK Rowling on the first three books to create a visual touchstone for the Harry Potter films that would follow.
In 2007, the Ringling College of Art and Design presented a retrospective of Byrd's work, and in 2023 he was commissioned by Abrams Books with co-author Robert von Goeben to write his autobiography POSTER CHILD: The Psychedelic Art & Technicolor Life of David Edward Byrd.
