06-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
David Edward Byrd, Whose Posters Captured the Psychedelic Age, Dies at 83
David Edward Byrd moved to a farm in Port Jervis, N.Y., in 1967 to join a community of other young artists known as Fantasy Unlimited. The group was simultaneously a hippie commune and a driven, capitalist enterprise. It produced multimedia light shows, featuring luminescent liquid projections of undulating color, hand-drawn animations, bubble machines and strobes—at dance parties and corporate events. It was a heady time; 'There was an effort to bring that kind of sensual-awareness experience to the corporate world,' explained a Fantasy Unlimited member, Nina Berson.
Byrd had recently finished art school at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, now Carnegie Mellon University. He was a classically trained painter with a master of fine arts degree in stone lithography and devoted to the work of Caravaggio, Gauguin and Francis Bacon. Not necessarily a natural fit for a psychedelic light show. But Byrd had fallen on hard times after graduation, both personally and professionally—'The only job I could get was washing underwear in an Armenian laundry,' he later recalled—and his college roommate, a founder of Fantasy Unlimited, was throwing him a lifeline.
