David Byrne, the Artist, Is Totally Connected

There’s a new gallery show and book of his whimsical line drawings — and coming this summer, an immersive art-and-science experience.

David Byrne is all about connectedness these days. “Everybody’s  coming to my house/And I’m never gonna be alone,” he sings on Broadway in “American Utopia,” half joyful, half fretful, still open. His online magazine, “Reasons to Be Cheerful” — which bills itself as “a tonic for tumultuous times” — catalogs all the ways in which people are pulling together to make sure the world does not in fact go to hell in a handbasket. And on Feb. 2, he reprises this theme of connectedness at Pace Gallery in Chelsea with a show of 48 whimsical line drawings that span 20 years of art making, from his “tree” series of the early ’00s to the “dingbats” he made in lockdown in 2020-2021.

Byrne’s drawings are modest affairs, not much bigger than a standard sheet of paper. They compare perhaps with George Cruikshank’s illustrations for “Oliver Twist,” or John Tenniel’s for “Alice in Wonderland.” But when I dropped by the gallery two weeks ago to see them being hung, I found him some 15 feet up in the air, standing on a hydraulic lift as he labeled branches of an enormous tree he’d drawn on a wall that’s a good 20 feet high.

Tree drawings are like org charts: They define relationships. This one, titled “Human Content” and splayed in super-scale across the stark, white wall, is different in ways that are unique to Byrne. It shows not only branches but roots, and while the branches are labeled with familiar human categories — “nephews,” “boys,” “cousins,” “aunts,” “friends” — the roots bear the names of things that in one way or another affect our lives: “sugar,” “sand,” “boxes,” “words,” “wheels,” “holes,” “sauces.”