The painter David Byrd was an outsider artist. The presentation focuses on Byrd’s real and imagined landscapes of the small hamlet where he lived for the majority of his life, Sidney Center, and the surrounding rural area of upstate New York. Byrd was born in 1926 to a mother whose destitution forced her to eventually place her five kids in foster homes. He was reunited with her some four years later after she got a job as a movie ticket seller, in New York City in the early 1940s. At age 17, he joined the Merchant Marines, and was later drafted into the US Army during World War II. He used the GI Bill to enroll at the Ozenfant School of Fine Arts in New York City, where he studied for two years under the French painter Amédée Ozenfant. Shortly after, he relocated to upstate New York, where he resided until his death in 2013. From the late-1950s onward Byrd painted scenes from his daily commute between Sidney Center and Montrose, NY – including the Catskill Mountains, bridges and highway overpasses, gas stations, laundromats, and shopping centers. As Byrd painted from memory, and often re-visited imagery and styles explored in previous decades, the chronology of his works is often surprising. Byrd’s style bears influence from different art historical periods: from European Post-Impressionism to Modernism and Cubism, to American Realism and Regionalism. He injects realistic portrayal with fantasy, lending an unsettling psychology to these otherwise tranquil compositions. Byrd's work shows his understanding of human emotion, his isolation, and tells the story of a lifetime spent carefully looking.

David Byrd (born 1926 in Springfield, Illinois) was an American painter who and lived and worked in various parts of New York. Byrd’s work was not publicly exhibited until only a few months before his death at the age of 87. Through the establishment of the David Byrd Estate, his work has continued to be studied and exhibited posthumously.