A History of the World (in Dingbats): Drawings & Words

The phenomenally creative musician and filmmaker David Byrne presents new artwork that explores daily life in surprising ways, with unique reflections on shared human experiences - a book for our time from a highly influential artist

Through striking and humorous figurative drawings, the iconic artist and musician David Byrne depicts daily life in intriguing ways. His illustrations, created while under quarantine, expand on the dingbat, a typographic ornament used to illuminate or break up blocks of text, to explore the nuances of life under lockdown and evoke the complex, global systems the pandemic cast in bright light. Edited and designed by Alex Kalman in close collaboration with Byrne, this unique book reflects on shared experiences and presents history as a story that is continually undergoing revision.

 

David Byrne’s practice spans photography, performance, drawing, illustration, video, design, and publishing. In 1975 he cofounded the seminal group Talking Heads. Byrne’s exuberant and radical creativity has challenged classifications of art for decades. His Bicycle Diaries was a Los Angeles Times bestseller and his How Music Works was a New York Times bestseller as well as an Amazon Editors’ pick and a Best Book of the Month. His hit Tony Award–winning theatrical concert American Utopia was adapted by Spike Lee into a concert film that premiered on HBO and received multiple Emmys.

Alex Kalman is a curator, designer, editor, journalist, and filmmaker. He is the owner of What Studio? and director of Mmuseumm. His exhibitions have been shown at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art. He is a contributor to the New York Times, the Atlantic, and the New Yorker.

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