#tony fitzpatrick

[lisamarie-vee]

[art-institute-archive]

Fitzpatrick, Tony. The First Radiant Mermaid. 1994. Color etching with aquatint on cream wove paper, laid down on white wove paper, 31.1 × 30.5 cm. The Art Institute of Chicago.

[jgthirlwell]

02.28.25 Tony Fitzpatrick at the Outsider Art Fair 2025 at the Metropolitan Pavilion in Manhattan.

[dare-g]

Walls in the City (1994)

[grundoonmgnx]

Tony Fitzpatrick, Michigan Bird, 2024

Collage

[rustbeltjessie]

I first discovered Tony Fitzpatrick’s work at the Messages & Magic: 100 Years of Collage and Assemblage in American Art exhibit at the Kohler Arts Center in January 2009. I fell in love with his work because of the monsters and matchbooks, tattoo imagery and poetry and pin-up girls—and because of Chicago. For me, much like for Fitzpatrick, it all comes back to Chicago. Though I only lived in Chicago for a handful of years, I spent a lot of time there both before I moved there and after I left. And the time in which I resided there was my late teens and early-mid twenties—the era of my life when I was coming into my own, and developing many of the interests and obsessions which continue to drive me. I think often of something Lucy Sante wrote in the introduction to Low Life: Lures & Snares of Old New York. In it, she speaks of her feelings about New York City, and it perfectly describes how I feel about Chicago: I wasn’t born… [there] …and I may never live there again…but I was changed forever by it, my imagination is manacled to it, and I wear its mark the way you wear a scar. Whatever happens, whether I like it or not,… [it] …is fated always to remain my home.

All of Fitzpatrick’s art speaks to me, but none more so than his Chicago pieces. This was as true while viewing Jesus of Western Avenue as it has ever been. I spent a lot of my visit to the CCMA noticing the neighborhoods, buildings, and signage depicted in various pieces—whether they were the focal image or appeared as smaller details—and quietly exclaiming: “Hey! I used to live right near there! I used to work in that building! I hung out at that place all the time!” And it was two of the pieces with signage as the focal point which resonated with me most strongly. Not only because of the visuals, but because of the poetry.

In the piece featuring the DriveOut Auto sign, Fitzpatrick’s words could have come straight from a Lou Reed song, or a Tom Waits song, or from a poet onstage at the Green Mill, performing with a backing jazz ensemble: Cowboys got off horses for a metallic-flake / midnight-blue Impala / with spinning rims and the homicidal snarl of a 386 trying on: steel, / Lord have mercy: steel. / Sequential lights—blinking the Western Avenue semaphore: The Midnight Auto. Open All Nite. / No Money Down.

In the piece featuring the sign for Barry’s Cut Rate Drugs, the poem jumped straight from the streets of Nelson Algren’s Chicago and into the present day: The wind knifed his face like a thousand tiny icicles; he felt his pocket, in a panic, to make sure his wake-up dope was still there… Down Milwaukee Avenue; he saw orange embers dance upward from a garbage-fire like petals from a dragon’s mouth… And for the first time in his life, he sang… And I stood there weeping in front of it; witnessing this small moment of dignity and beauty blossoming before me.

—Jessie Lynn McMains, from “Jesus of Western Avenue & The Apostles of Humboldt Park” (December 2021)

Hearing the recent news that Tony Fitzpatrick has passed made me want to reshare this piece I wrote in December 2021. (Side note: in the original piece, I deadname/use the incorrect pronouns for Lucy Sante. When I wrote the piece, she hadn’t publicly come out yet, and unfortunately I have no way of logging back into the site and changing it now.)

[chaoselph]

Tony Fitzpatrick, Chicago artist and icon, dies at 66 - Axios Chicago

Tony Fitzpatrick, Chicago artist and icon, dies at 66

The celebrated artist, writer and actor died of a heart attack while awaiting a lung transplant.

[nobrashfestivity]

Tony Fitzpatrick, Humboldt Park Tern (Longing For The Sea), 2021, watercolor, ink, gouache, colored pencil, and ephemera on paper, 10 by 12 inches. COURTESY ANDREW DEGENHOLTZ