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Multidisciplinary artist, poet, and actor Tony Fitzpatrick, who channeled his love for his native Chicago and his fascination with birds into vibrant collages, prints, paintings, and drawings, died of a heart attack while awaiting a double lung transplant at the city’s Rush University Medical Center on October 11. He was sixty-six. A charismatic connector of people with a colorful history—he worked variously as a bouncer, a boxer, a bartender, a caddy, a construction worker, and a radio host—he was a tireless advocate for his hometown and for its talent, founding galleries to elevate the careers of others. His own work seethed with the gritty vernacular of the street, evoking the Sturm und Drang of the Midwestern metropolis. “Fitzpatrick is an auteur of quintessentially American images,” wrote Jenifer P. Borum in a 1993 issue of Artforum. “His is an often violent, but always astute look at the darker side of American life, rendered with tattoo-parlor frankness and unmistakably Catholic drama and pathos.”
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Tony Fitzpatrick was born on November 24, 1958, in Chicago, one of eight children raised Catholic in suburban Lombard, Illinois. His father, a veteran of World War II, was a burial vault salesman and would often take Fitzpatrick with him on business trips, regaling him with tales of the city. Fitzpatrick began drawing as a child. He would later credit his grandmother with instilling in him his love of birds, a favorite subject. “I’d say, ‘Why are you giving all our bread to the birds?,’” he told an interviewer in 2021, as reported by Chicago’s WBEZ, recalling his confusion over her habit of tossing toast crumbs to sparrows and mourning doves when she had eight young mouths to feed. “‘You know, birds are the first music the Irish ever had,’ she said. ‘If you’re quiet and you watch, for a piece of bread you can hear God sing.’”
Having flunked art at Montini Catholic High School, Fitzpatrick struggled in his early years with drug and alcohol abuse. He began hanging around local gyms, sketching fighters there and eventually stepping into the ring himself for a two-year career as an unsanctioned club fighter that ended when an opponent responded to his pre-fight taunts by downing a bologna sandwich. Brief stints studying acting at the College of DuPage and art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign followed, but nothing stuck and Fitzpatrick would remain largely self-taught, producing bright, busy prints and drawings that teemed with flowers, birds, athletes, monsters, bleeding hearts, religious imagery, and towering buildings. In the 1980s, he moved to New York, where he peddled his drawings in Washington Square to such interested buyers as Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat.
Back in Chicago, he began acting to support himself, appearing in productions at the city’s renowned Steppenwolfe Theatre, for which he would later write plays, and starring in a David Schwimmer-directed production of Studs Terkel’s Race at New York’s Lookingglass Theatre. Fitzpatrick branched out into film, appearing in fifteen major motion pictures, among them Married to the Mob, Philadelphia, The Fugitive, and Mad Dog and Glory. Recent roles included a recurring role on the Amazon series Patriot.
His career as an actor burgeoned alongside his art career, which took off when soul, funk, and R&B group the Neville Brothers tapped him to create the cover for their 1989 Grammy-winning breakthrough album Yellow Moon. Fitzpatrick continued to produce prints and drawings as well as collages that incorporated his poetry and writing, showing in local galleries and those in Los Angeles, New York, London, and Paris. He was given a solo exhibition at MoMA PS1 in New York in 2007 and in 2008 was the subject of a retrospective at the Chicago Cultural Center and participated in the New Orleans Biennial, additionally exhibiting his work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC.
His career as a gallerist kept pace with his other activities. In 1990, inspired by the Cold House Group, an artist collective that snubbed the gallery system by staging their own exhibitions, he cofounded World Tattoo Gallery in a downtown warehouse: The space would be the first of several through which he would foster local talent, with later galleries including Firecat Projects (an offshoot of his printmaking studio Big Cat Press), Adventureland, and, most recently, The Dime. Fitzpatrick was known for encouraging reluctant artists who didn’t initially apprehend their own talents as he did, and for mentoring young up-and-comers.
Fitzpatrick published a number of books during his lifetime, including the three-volume The Wonder: Portraits of a Remembered City; Bum Town; Dime Stories; and, earlier this fall, The Sun at the End of the Road: Dispatches from an American Life. His work is held in the collections of major institutions including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Miami.
“People say my drawings are busy—how long am I going to fucking live?” Fitzpatrick told the Chicago Reader in 1991. “I’ve got to pack as much into each one as I can. Yeah, there are people who say there’s too much shit there, and I tell them, ‘Fuck you, it’s my paper, it’s my pencil.’ I have this irrational, rotten fear of dying. I want to get all this stuff into the picture before I go. To me these are testaments to my fucking life. Do I want a whole area empty? Fuck no, no way. So I’m going to pack these.”
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