A holy card for Chicago
TONY FITZPATRICK completes his magnum opus, 'The Wonder -- Portraits of a Remembered City'
He lapsed from the Catholic Church long ago, but Tony Fitzpatrick still carries a holy card in his wallet. It memorializes his father, James Raymond Fitzpatrick: Born April 23, 1925. At rest Sept. 17, 1988. Mass and Christian burial at St. Pius X Catholic Church. The card shows St. Theresa, holding a crucifix and some flowers.
"Whenever he won at gambling, he cut the St. Theresa Society in for 10 percent," he says of his father, a traveling burial-vault salesman whose fondness for cards and other games of chance earned him the nickname of Ace. "I had a problem with being dismissed from school quite often, so my dad would take me around with him. He would drive all around Chicago, and every neighborhood, he had a story for. It was like the city was my dad's house, and every day he showed me a different room."
(Rich Hein/Sun-Times/AP)
Fitzpatrick's expeditions with his dad would become the central narrative of his just-completed magnum opus: "The Wonder -- Portraits of a Remembered City," a simultaneously intimate and epic series of drawing-collages commemorating his father and the city they explored together. The product of a decade of memory-keeping and memory-transforming, "The Wonder" has been reproduced and collected in a trilogy of books -- the third and darkest volume of which, City of Monsters, City of Ghosts, will be published this week, just in time for the opening of a major exhibition of about 60 of the original pieces at the Chicago Cultural Center.
"When my father was dying [of cancer], there was a little box of his stuff -- matchbooks, gambling books, lotto tickets -- and I wanted to make some pieces that I could show him that were about his life," Fitzpatrick recalls. "That's when the first two drawing-collages happened. One was called 'The Music of White Flowers,' because we'd go to funeral homes and there'd always be calla lilies and other white flowers in this Roman Catholic atmosphere. There was always this idea of mortality that hung over us. The Catholics never let you forget you were going to die someday."
After Fitzpatrick's father's death, his son continued to pour his feelings about his dad and his city -- love, loss, grief and, at times, no small amount of anger -- into the project for a decade. And although Fitzpatrick now calls himself an atheist, "The Wonder" is illuminated by the chipped gold-leaf residue of his past as one of eight children in a Catholic family on the South Side of Chicago.
"You can't wash it off," he says of his religious heritage. Most of the pieces feature a drawn central icon surrounded, in an echo of early Renaissance paintings of pietas and saints, by a profusion of collaged elements often associated with Catholicism -- flowers, candles, rosaries -- in open, perhaps heavenly fields.
The collages contain distinctly secular elements as well: the dice and playing cards, the girlie pictures (many of them X-Acto-knifed from old burlesque-house ads) that, growing up in a Catholic household, "represented forbidden fruit for me," Fitzpatrick says with a smile. "Most little boys go through that thing where it's 'Ooooh, icky girls!' Not me. Liked 'em immediately. In first grade, I gave away my mother's costume jewelry to girls in my class in first grade -- an earring, a brooch. My mom made me bring it all back."
There's also baseball lore, especially related to Fitzpatrick's beloved White Sox (as in "Joe Crede of Chicago," made in the World Series year of 2005), boxers, angels, carnival clowns, animals (especially birds, bulls, fish and butterflies) and city landmarks.
Most poignantly of all, the pieces are often anchored at their four corners by vintage ads and matchbook covers (many from a vast cache accumulated by Red Hogan, the father of a friend of the artist) hawking everything a Chicago working man could desire: steakhouses and strip clubs, beer gardens and cigar stores, racetracks and bowling alleys, hotels of diverse repute.
"It's a celebration of the city my dad and a lot of the old working guys introduced me to," Fitzpatrick says. "This was the city I knew, and I felt like there wasn't anything in the art world, including the Chicago art world, that was like that. I used the things working people carried in their pockets every day, because when you go to art galleries or look at art magazines, you don't get any whiff of the culture of working people. They're invisible, and I come from a long line of them."
The third major component of the pieces is Fitzpatrick's slender lines of tough-and-tender poetry, often strung down one side of the image like a fire escape, enunciating and reflecting his themes.
"What's great about the pieces is their blend of image and text -- there's actual poetry and found poetry, the language of the streets and the language of pop culture and art culture and baseball culture and Chicago culture, especially Catholic Chicago," says Lanny Silverman, curator of the Cultural Center show. "They're like Catholic holy cards, enshrining memories."
Taken together, in fact, they're an elaborate, intensely personal holy card for Chicago as sacred ground -- holy ground. "They're what I have to say to the city," Fitzpatrick says. " 'The Wonder' was a love letter . . . and a goodbye letter."
No, Fitzpatrick isn't leaving Chicago, at least not entirely. But these days he spends about half the year in New York, home of his primary gallery, Pierogi (which sells his original pieces for between $14,000 and $17,000), and of one of his closest friends, folk-rock troubadour Steve Earle.
"There's never been a visual artist as Chicago-centric as Tony Fitzpatrick, and I don't think you'll run across anybody that's prouder of being from Chicago or with a deeper connection to Chicago artists," Earle says. "But the center of the art world is still in New York, and I think Tony's very conscious of that."
And recently, he's been spending increasing amounts of time in New Orleans, a city he has loved since designing an album cover for the Neville Brothers in 1988; the devastation of Katrina, and the resilient and generous spirit of the people in the storm's aftermath, only endeared the city to him even more.
"I've needed to free myself of my father's ghost," Fitzpatrick says. "I'm going to be 50 years old this year, and I've been making art about the world he showed me for a very long time. I love Chicago, but it's time to make work about something else."
Fitzpatrick has already moved on, at least imaginatively. His latest drawing-collages are all about New Orleans, the first batch of which will be shown as part of the inaugural New Orleans biennial, Prospect.1, opening on Halloween night. They will be published next year in a new collection, A Thousand Beautiful Things, by Firecat, a new publishing venture he's starting with a group of friends.
What does Fitzpatrick like about New Orleans? Its beauty, of course, its audacious flair and, maybe most of all, its benign attitude toward diversity and eccentricity of all kinds. ("I met a Vietnamese shrimper there with a Cajun accent and a mother who was a Choctaw," he says. "And one of my favorite people down there is this transgendered guy who's got a goatee and a better rack than Pamela Anderson.")
"We're an underdog city, and that's part of what draws Tony to us," says his poet friend Laurie Williams, a former Chicago resident who has lived in New Orleans for many years. "He has a deep connection to Chicago, but he's got another deep connection here. Tony is Chicago, in many ways, but that doesn't mean he can't find a home in New Orleans or in New York."
Joe Amrhein, director of Pierogi, agrees. "I understand that Chicago-centric thing, the fact that his work is so connected to his father and growing up. But every artist needs to step out of where they are to see where they're going, and I think Tony wants to do that now."
It's also true that although Fitzpatrick loves Chicago itself, he can muster virtually no affection for the local art establishment. He's long been at odds, for example, with Chicago art dealers, who he says don't do nearly enough to earn their customary commissions of 50 percent.
"The mob doesn't get 50 percent -- and believe me, I know," he says with a sly look. "Somewhere in the ethos of Chicago when it comes to the visual arts, there's a failure of the imagination, and until they fix it, talent's going to move away. They should publish, they should buy ads, they should have a working exchange program with galleries from other cities. The galleries here, they look for stuff they can sell. I commiserate with that, but guys, be less the merchant and more the visionary entrepreneur. Make it happen, the way they do in New York and L.A."
Fitzpatrick also tangled with the city's Department of Cultural Affairs, becoming a spokesman last year for an artists' protest of changes to the city's public art ordinance. (The protest failed, but he still calls the revised ordinance "bad government.")
And while he's less vociferous in his criticisms of Chicago's art institutions than his colleague Wesley Kimler, Fitzpatrick largely agrees with Kimler that they tend to neglect homegrown talent, especially when it doesn't emerge from the University of Illinois at Chicago or the School of the Art Institute.
"I was never one of their products," Fitzpatrick (who never went to college) says. "I didn't come out of UIC or the Art Institute."
Instead, he came out of Marquette Park. The corner of 73rd and Racine, to be exact.
His earliest influences there were comic books, Chester Gould's "Dick Tracy," Mad magazine, horror movies, tattoos, billboards, ads inked on butcher paper in grocery-store windows. "When I was a little kid, the art that was all around me, nobody ever bothered to tell me it was art. But all of it had incredible pop for me."
Around 1980, when he finally started visiting the Art Institute's collection, he was struck by three things: Edward Hopper's "Nighthawks" ("that so spoke to me," he says), the boxes of Joseph Cornell and the "combines" of Robert Rauschenberg. By then, though, Fitzpatrick had been drawing for years, and was already beginning to incorporate collage into his work.
"The best way to piss Tony off -- which is a risky thing to do -- is to refer to him as an 'outsider' artist," Earle says. "People equate what he does with folk art, when actually he's a really skilled, trained artist. Starting with 'The Wonder,' I think his pieces really hit a level all its own, and the New Orleans stuff may be even better. It's really smoking."
Wherever Fitzpatrick's life and career take him next, he'll still be the same burly, balding, cigarette-chomping, Sox-cap-wearing working stiff he always was. For years he's kept up a grueling schedule of 10 hours a day, six days a week, wherever he is. His output is prodigious; last week, the count of his New Orleans drawing-collages hit 47.
He's also beginning to produce some three-dimensional pieces -- declining to describe them as "sculptures," he calls them "objects of desire" -- some of which will be first seen as part of the Cultural Center show this week.
Fitzpatrick's favorite thing about the show? It's free. "They don't charge admission, and that's hugely important to me, because the people I make drawings for can't afford the 20 bucks at the Art Institute or the 12 bucks at the MCA." Silverman understands: "He doesn't want it to be just for the darlings of the art world, but for everyday people as well."
Like the people in "The Wonder." Like Fitzpatrick's dad, whose holy card in his son's wallet frays a little more, every passing day.
