A Chicago eulogy: in recent collages combining vintage matchbooks, poetry and a personal iconography derived from his prints and drawings, Chicago artist Tony Fitzpatrick has fashioned an homage to his storytelling father and the hometown they shared

Art in America, May, 2005 by Faye Hirsch

Tony Fitzpatrick, 47, denizen of Chicago, artist, actor, poet, tattooist, musician and ex-boxer, is busy these days making collages, among them an ongoing series called "The Wonder," a paean to his hometown. This is a departure for Fitzpatrick, who since the late 1980s has mainly focused on prints and drawings. He recently exhibited 27 of the collages at Pierogi, in Brooklyn, and published the first of two books reproducing them.

The collages resemble one another in composition. At the center of each brightly colored page, Fitzpatrick creates a hieratic emblem in ink and gouache--a lordly pigeon, an alert starling, an onrushing train, etc.; around the edge of the page he fashions a narrow border of colored stripes. At the bottom, and sometimes the top, he paints a patch imitating yellow notepad paper, on which, in black cursive, he writes a legend that sums up the imagery; sometimes it doubles as the title of the piece (e.g., King of Chicago for the pigeon, 2004). Mong the rest of the top and bottom are single rows of old promotional matchbook covers from iconic nightspots, restaurants and hotels, or cutouts from postcards and baseball cards, sealing off the field in neat building blocks brimming with Chicago allusions.

These framing devices hold in check the unruliness of the main field--apart from the emblem, a free-for-all of tiny glued or painted elements, many of them (crowns, raindrops, bugs, starlets, saints, playing cards, dice, skyscrapers) adapted from the artist's earlier drawings and prints, others new, or at least newly prominent (oval cutouts of musical notes, lottery numbers, snippets of ads in Chinese and Korean). The collages are generally vertical, around 13 by 10 inches; some are smaller, a few horizontal. The painted sheets, too, serve to unify the group with solid backgrounds of yellow, red and, for a few night scenes, black.

In the most recent of these collages (he began working in the medium in 1998, but the majority of pieces date to the past two years), Fitzpatrick includes brief poems; each reads in a narrow stack down the left or right margin, one word per line. Some of the poems are made of found text cut out from a variety of printed sources, but most are handwritten in cursive script or capital letters the same scale as the letters and numbers scattered throughout the main field or labeling the matchbooks. Fervent and run-on, the poems convey a Whitmanesque populism and love of place: "CHICAGO MAKES SOME SOUNDS THAT ONLY DOGS CAN HEAR SILENT MUSIC SEARCHING FOR LIPS TO PLAY UPON. DOGS HEAR THE MUSIC AND STAND ON THIER [sic] HIND LEGS AND SING SAD SONGS IN SPANISH AND POLISH AND ARABIC TO EVERY CITY BUS ON EVERY CHICAGO STREET." This is the poem for Pimp Dog (2004), a burly boxer dog dressed as an old-fashioned pugilist; he stands on his hind legs and puffs out "Pow" amid half-naked girls and beheaded martyrs, semiquavers and tiny white blossoms. The poems, in both scale and voice, place the artist within the work as surely as a self-portrait would, but more loquaciously; it's as if he were standing on the sidelines spewing commentary.

Much of the Chicago lore in "The Wonder" was transmitted to Fitzpatrick by his late father, James. An earlier project, the graphite drawings, poem and book "Bum Town" (1998), was also devoted to the anecdotes of James, a burial vault salesman. He used to retrieve Tony (one of eight children, and the renegade) from the various parochial schools that repeatedly suspended or expelled him ("A perfectly good Catholic education shot in the ass," said James), (1) so Tony often accompanied James on his rounds. As they drove through the Chicago neighborhoods, James told stories, and Tony later made these stories his life's work, linking himself in words and images to a great tradition of Chicago chroniclers--James T. Farrell, Upton Sinclair, Nelson Algren, Studs Terkel, etc.--and to a funky, expressive strain in Chicago art.

Among "The Wonder" collages are several titled White Flowers, which are missives, of a sort, to his father (the white flowers refer to those found in funeral homes). (2) These are night scenes, with white roses, daffodils and dogwood apparitional in skies stocked with constellations. Here, there are no poems, but instead brief messages on the yellow ledgers; "Dad," reads one, "last night I went to Comiskey and remembered you, cheering for Luke Appling and Nellie Fox; under the stars--rounding 3rd--you held your son's hand." Appling and Fox were baseball heroes of the father's era, not the son's (though Fox retired when Tony was five); such conflations are de rigueur in the collages, as if to craft a continuous tale, uninterrupted by the passage of generations. At the top, a Sox vs. Cardinals ticket stub from Comiskey Park is dated June 8, 1998, the last game father and son attended together, just weeks before James died.

The collages contain nostalgia aplenty for the Chicago of James's-and to some extent Tony's--youth, boosted in no small degree by samples from a collection of some 100,000 matchbooks dating back to the '40s, given to the artist by a friend. So the collages have an antiquated look, and the stories they tell are most often of yesterday's Chicago, with its stockyards and steel mills, amusement parks and warehouses, machine politics and graft. The great steer of Standing Beast (2004) is a phantom of that Chicago, his body studded with windows and musical notes, and his hoofs made of bricks. The poem reads, "THE BULL OF CHICAGO'S STOCKYARD ALMOST DEATH AND ALMOST STONE, RAISES HIS SNOUT AND BELLOWS LIKE THE OLDEST CHILD OF A CENTURY THE MUSIC OF SLAUGHTER AS LOUD AS A TRAIN." Red Star (2003), "blinking over the city of Chicago at night," as the legend reads, illuminates old-time bars, cigars and gamblers' trinkets; the pasted musical notes are nearly audible, like strains emanating from Chicago's heyday.