Tony Fitzpatrick, one of Chicago’s most celebrated multidisciplinary artists and a prominent advocate for the city itself, died Saturday of a heart attack. He was 66. According to family members, he was awaiting a double lung transplant and died at Rush University Medical Center.
Over several decades, Mr. Fitzpatrick was not just a prolific creator of mixed-media collages, drawings and paintings, he also was transformative as a gallery owner, poet, essayist, radio host, newspaper columnist, printmaker, and actor in film, television, and the stage. His greatest role was representing Chicago, primarily through his art, which he exhibited in the art world’s most prestigious institutions in North America, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Miami, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington. His work is also in the private collections of Martin Scorsese, Bill Gates, Lou Reed, Harrison Ford, among others.
“He was always very much a Chicago guy,” his brother, Kevin Fitzpatrick, told the Sun-Times. “He accepted it with all its blemishes and all its bruises. He saw the best in it. He would walk over and see nature in the Humboldt Park Lagoon. He would find the things he wanted in the city, and he defended it all the way to his death.”
His collages focused on things he loved during his suburban childhood: comic books, newspaper comic strips, dogs, boxing and baseball. Birds remained a consistent theme in his art throughout his life; in 2021 he told an interviewer that his fascination with birds and love of falconry originated from his grandmother, “who could not tell you a cardinal from a blue jay.”
“Every morning she’d toast a couple of pieces of bread, spread some jelly on it, chop it up and throw it out the back door to the birds. I’m one of eight kids, you know, and we never wasted food, and I’d say, ‘Why are you giving all our bread to the birds?’ She looks at me and says do me a favor and be quiet. Give your ears a chance for once. And she opens the window a little bit, and then I heard it. I heard swallows and red-winged blackbirds, mourning doves, and she said, ‘You know, birds are the first music the Irish ever had,’ and she said, ‘If you’re quiet and you watch, for a piece of bread you can hear God sing.’”
Ordinary becoming extraordinary
To his brother, Mr. Fitzpatrick had “an extraordinarily creative mind.” Art was his focus from the beginning.
“He was a guy who could concentrate while not concentrating. He would be at school and a lesson going on which he had little to no interest in and suddenly there would be 400 images in his mind that would bear on him, and he put them all in his collages and then he would tie them together,” Kevin Fitzpatrick said. “They were things that fascinated him, things that inspired him, things that happened to him every day. The ordinary became extraordinary to him.”
Mr. Fitzpatrick was born in 1958 and was one of eight children growing up in suburban Lombard. He took formal art classes at the College of DuPage, which he later said had a profound effect on his life. “The greatest thing is that nobody said, ‘You can’t do that’ or ‘That’s impossible.’ They said, ‘Do it!’” he said during a return trip to the school in 2021. “I realized that COD was a place about making anything possible.”
His multidisciplinary approach to art was evident early in his career; in the late 1980s he was appearing as an actor in films and local theater, hosting a movie review show on radio, writing for a local newspaper and had his work accepted at group gallery shows in New York and Philadelphia.
An early break came in 1989 when the powerhouse New Orleans R&B group the Neville Brothers hired him to create the cover of “Yellow Moon.” The album would become the group’s global breakthrough and earn them a Grammy. One year later, Mr. Fitzpatrick co-founded World Tattoo, his South Loop gallery that doubled as an art collective and performance space.
Jon Langford, the punk musician who moved to Chicago in 1992 from his native Wales, first performed in Chicago with his band the Mekons at the gallery. In 1993, Mr. Fitzpatrick persuaded Langford to have his first art show there as well. To Langford, Mr. Fitzpatrick “was very unusual in that he was very interested in other people’s art.”
“I can’t think of my art without Tony. He showed me how to do it. He pushed me. He made me do it,” Langford said. “He gave me confidence.”
Advocate for artists
As a gallery owner, Mr. Fitzpatrick often advocated for people who didn’t necessarily follow the traditional art school trajectory but who he felt still had a valuable voice.
In 2018, Mr. Fitzpatrick encouraged John Soss, a friend, to exhibit photographs that Soss would periodically upload to Facebook of found objects he collected along the Lake Michigan shoreline. Soss turned him down twice. The third time, Soss said, Mr. Fitzpatrick “was no longer asking.” Soss’ first show went up at The Dime, Mr. Fitzpatrick’s gallery in Wicker Park. Two subsequent shows followed in recent years.
“He saw something there that I didn’t remotely see myself,” Soss said. “If you look at what I did for the first show and how things hit a better level on the second and third shows, his encouragement and his belief in me helped me work harder and do better work.” Soss said his experience was similar to many other people who flourished through Mr. Fitzpatrick’s advocacy.
“I can’t imagine anyone who is a practicing artist who also took the time and had the generous spirit to prop people up and give them a shot to do whatever he could to get people to the show,” Soss said. “I don’t even know how he pulled it off over and over and over again. He was one of a kind that way.”
Mr. Fitzpatrick particularly mentored younger artists, such as Danny Torres, a Chicago-based painter 30 years his junior. As Mr. Fitzpatrick recuperated in the hospital from a heart attack in 2015, a nurse told him about Torres, her nephew, who was at the time in graduate school for art. Once home, Mr. Fitzpatrick reached out. They became immediate friends. “He walked the path I always wanted to walk,” Torres said.
Primarily, Mr. Fitzpatrick taught Torres a code of ethics he believed every artist should follow: “If you work hard, you’re consistent, you share your work, good things will happen,” Torres said. “Along with that, treat people with respect and be friendly to everybody — it doesn’t matter who. Everyone’s important.”
In later years, Mr. Fitzpatrick often held court among, not just artists, but journalists, theater makers, restaurateurs, academics, among others. His prolific art output was matched only by the largesse of his personality — one that matched the legendary bravado of the city he loved.
“He was a huge connector of people,” said Bob Chiarito, a friend. “Being with him at his studio or a restaurant always felt to me like I imagine being with Hemingway in Paris would have been like. He always attracted a cast of characters, always treated everyone with respect, from the bus boy to the studio executive. He truly was an irreplaceable person,” he said. “This is a huge loss for the entire city of Chicago.”
Mr. Fitzpatrick wrote several poetry collections and produced many art books. Starting in 1989, he also appeared as an actor in Hollywood films, including “Mad Dog and Glory,” “Philadelphia,” “Chi-Raq,” and “Primal Fear.” He recently had a reoccurring role in the television series “Patriot.”
His workaholic tendencies had to do with understanding that time was precious, he once said.
“You only get one ride around the fountain, and then it’s into the ditch,” he told an interviewer in 2021. “There’s a poem by Mary Oliver, ‘What will you do with this one precious life you have?’ Well, I chose this. It’s evolved over 45 years, and I still enjoy doing this every day. I still enjoy making art largely about Chicago.”
Last fall, Mr. Fitzpatrick began emailing periodic diary entries to friends; each one included an image from his art, as well as a memory or his take on the day’s headlines. In June he shared an illustration of a bird and wrote about how Chicago’s parks provide a rich sanctuary for wildlife. They need it, he noted, because the current administration in Washington has little interest in protecting the environment. To Mr. Fitzpatrick, commitment gave life its meaning.
“Birds are worth fighting for, as are humans, as are all living things,” he wrote. “The world will be saved if people show up.”
Mr. Fitzpatrick is survived by his wife, Michelle, and their children, Max and Gabrielle Fitzpatrick, and their extended family. The family says no public memorial is planned at this time.