On a Sunday evening in late November, an estimated 1,100 people filled the Metro in Chicago to celebrate the life of Tony Fitzpatrick. The room was packed with artists, writers, musicians, chefs, politicians, actors, filmmakers, and countless others whose lives had been touched by this larger-than-life figure. As speaker after speaker took the stage, a portrait emerged of a man who was both a paradox, yet unflinching in his convictions. Lori Lightfoot called him a big burly guy, who made delicate etchings of birds. Dave Bonomi called him a fierce protector of the vulnerable, and David Roth said he was an artist who never threw away the ladder that was there for him when he needed it. His childhood friend John Hogan perhaps summed it up best when he acknowledged the mythology around Tony: “When you hear stories about Tony, you know that some of them might be true and some of them might be BS and that there’s 100 percent chance that 50 percent is BS.”

The Black Sheep with a Silver Lining

        Tony Fitzpatrick was, first and foremost, a working artist. As author Alex Kotlowitz said at the memorial, “Tony saw things no one else saw. All you had to do was look at one of his bewitching, mesmerizing collages—a chicken wearing a crown, a caterpillar ogling a nude woman, angels masquerading as moths, or a mermaid emerging from Lake Michigan.” He went on to say, “Sometimes I tried to imagine what it must have been like to be inside his head, and I thought, damn, it must be exhausting and scary, but also earth shattering, wild, tender, and fanciful.”

        But Tony was more than his art. He was an anchor in Chicago’s arts community, a natural showman who was deeply committed to supporting other artists. His wife Michele described Tony as someone who regularly attended openings, not only for the artists he showed at his gallery but for many others across Chicago. He was a known quantity in the city, and his presence at an opening was often noticed by artists and peers alike. Michele said he made a point of showing up even when exhausted because he wanted Chicago’s art world to be taken seriously and understood that attending other artists’ shows was a meaningful form of support.

        Michele said, “Tony was known for his transparency. Once you knew him, you knew all of him.” He had a command of the English language and an exceptional ability to turn a phrase. He did not feel the need to soften or censor himself. His writing came from the gut. His language was poetic. In Alex Kotlowitz’s memorial tribute, he shared how Tony described Humboldt Park with this comparison: “Some people have churches, but I have this place where I’m surrounded by divinity,” describing the wide array of bird life who made their homes there among all those trees and people who inhabited the park. Kotlowitz followed with. “From the guy who drove the nuns bat shit crazy… loud, blustering, kind, and generous, a walking contradiction.”

        His friend Dave Bonomi described Tony Fitzpatrick as “someone who loved deeply and intensely. He loved his family. He loved his friends. He loved dogs, birds, food, and the Chicago White Sox.” Dave also stated emphatically that Tony hated Donald Trump. When he said this at the memorial, the packed room responded with loud cheering and clapping. While Tony hated many things, he loved small things. He loved children and dogs, and he fought to protect what was small and vulnerable. One example was the piping plover, a small shorebird weighing approximately 1.5 to 2.2 ounces. Dave described Tony as a protector of such vulnerable beings. He also called him a “walking contradiction” and said a “whole team of psychiatrists could not figure him out.”

 

        Rick Kogan of the Chicago Tribune, a longtime friend, watched Tony evolve over four decades. Rick recalled first meeting Tony at Nelson Algren’s memorial in Sag Harbor where a drunken Tony walked over to Rick presenting him with a portrait he drew of Algren. Rick explained “it sort of looked like a picture…it did not look like Nelson.” He asked Tony, “what did you make that with?” Tony informed him that it was made with cigarette butt ashes. This was the beginning of their lifelong friendship. He characterized Tony as an “unstructured wild man searching for a way to survive and express his feelings. At first, it manifested as art, and as crude as it was in the beginning, he became an accomplished, hardworking artist. It manifested in words as a writer and a poet who also had a way with haiku. Then it manifested in him becoming an actor.” As Rick continued describing Fitzpatrick, he said, “You had to admire all of that, his guts, his resolve, one foot in front of the other way of living and being.”

        Rick continued “What really brought Tony peace was finding his wife, Michele. She did not tame the wild man. She accepted and grounded him. Prior to Michele, Tony was swimming in his vast crowd of identities. It was the grounding he found in Michele that steadied him. Together they created a family, Gabby and Max, who are now sibling filmmakers.”

New York: The Ladder Extended

        When I moved from Chicago to New York City in 1995, I was new to the city and still finding my way. One afternoon, while walking past the old Dean & DeLuca on Broadway in Soho, I spotted Tony sitting in the window eating a sandwich. I knew Tony from World Tattoo gallery in Chicago. He looked up, saw me, and in true Tony fashion came right outside and asked, “What are you doin’ here?”

        When I told him I’d recently moved to New York and was living in the neighborhood, he told me he was visiting some art shows in the area and invited me along. We spent the day wandering through galleries, Tony introducing me to people everywhere we went. Each time, he’d tell them, with absolute conviction, that he literally flies to New York just to get massages from me. Naturally that wasn’t true. I don’t think Tony ever got a massage in his life, but I wasn’t about to correct him. He was too charming, too sure of himself, and it was just easier and funnier to go with it.

        Later that day, he told me he had a show in an Upper East Side gallery and that I had to come, because he wanted to introduce me to his friends Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson. The next morning, I realized I didn’t have any business cards, so I went to Paper Source on Broadway, bought some silver card stock and a bunch of stamps, and made about 18 one-of-a-kind business cards by hand.

        When I arrived at the opening, I was looking at Tony’s work when I heard him call across the room, “Hey Evelyn! Come here, I want to introduce you to my friends Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson!” I walked over, trying to stay composed while he told that same story, that he flies to New York just to get massages from me. Lou asked if I had any cards, so I showed him the ones I’d made that morning. He looked them over and said, “Nice cards, can I take a couple of these?” That moment made my day, and shortly after, Lou Reed actually called me to schedule a massage. But truly, running into Tony that day is one of my favorite memories from my early life in New York. By the time I encountered him in Soho, Tony was already established in New York’s art world. But how he got there shaped everything about who he became for other artists.

 

Washington Square Park

         This is how Tony tells it in a film his son Max made about his dad’s life:

        Tony was in New York trying to figure out the art world in the early eighties. He had seen other artists selling work at Washington Square Park, so one day he went with his artwork and set himself up in the park. This kid comes walking up with his very cool glasses and a crew cut, and Tony thinks, “This guy is way more hip than me.”

        The guy looks at his drawings and asks, “What do you get for those?”

        Until that moment, Tony had not even thought about what to charge. So, as Tony put it, “I swung for the fence and said fifty bucks.” The guy said, “I want those three,” and hands him three fifty-dollar bills and asks if he will be back tomorrow.

        Tony says, “Yeah, you coming back?”

        The guy says, “Yes,” and tells him he will bring a friend.

        The next day Tony is in the same spot. The guy shows up with his friend. Tony sees them walking toward him and thinks this is probably the coolest guy he has ever seen in his whole life, walking in the park smoking a joint. The friend looks at the work and asks, “Do you have more of these?”

        Tony says yes. The guy asks, “What do you get?”

        Tony says, “Fifty bucks.”

        The guy says, “I want those two. Do you have more with you?”

        Tony replies, “Yeah, back where I’m staying.”

        The guy gives him the money, and Tony realizes he now has two hundred fifty dollars, “enough to eat at a place that has silverware.”

        The two guys step a few feet away, briefly talking between themselves. Then one of them turns to Tony and says, “You know, there is an easier way to do this.”

        Tony says, “Do tell.”

        The guy asks, “Do you have half an hour?”

        Tony replies, “I have nothing but time.”

        Next thing he knows, they are walking with him up Seventh Avenue. The place they are going is only a few blocks away, but it takes a good half hour because every five feet someone walks up to them to air kiss and hug them. Tony starts thinking these guys must be somebody.

        They finally get to the gallery Tony had visited a couple days earlier, and wouldn’t you know it, it is the same gallery where the same woman at the desk could not manage to lift her gaze from her Vanity Fair magazine when he had inquired about showing his drawings. He recalls she had barely responded and told him in her most monotone voice, “We only look at slides. We only look on Monday. You can pick them up on Tuesday.”

        Now suddenly this same woman practically throws herself out of her chair to greet these two guys. She kisses them on both cheeks. At this point Tony is wondering, “Who are these guys?”

        Later he learns they are none other than Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Tony said, “They had no reason to be kind to me at all. They just did it.”

        He got a show six months later. It sold out. He received a nice review in the New York Times. The last seven pieces were bought by the director Jonathan Demme, who became his lifelong friend.

        It was one of several moments that clearly altered Tony’s life, both personally and professionally. He never threw away the ladder that was there for him when he needed it. He extended it behind him for countless others, giving them shows in his galleries and introducing artists without social capital to people who could help bridge their talent into something meaningful and sometimes life changing.

Between two Cities

        In the mid-1970s through the early 1980s, Joe Shanahan and Tony Fitzpatrick discovered they were both going back and forth between Chicago and New York. Neither wanted to miss what was happening in either city. They were also moving through many of the same circles. Joe was watching bands before anyone knew what they would become. He was meeting artists like Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat at the Mudd Club, while Tony was getting familiar with many of the same people at openings, parties, and just running around the city. When they came home to Chicago, that recognition began turning into action. As Joe Shanahan’s Metro took shape as a home for emerging alternative music, Tony Fitzpatrick was simultaneously forging his identity as a visual artist, writer, poet, and actor and performer, while also opening galleries that became a bridge for artists to show their work and gain opportunities.

        Actor David Schwimmer, who met Tony in 1989 when they opened an art gallery and performance space called Edge of the Lookingglass in the South Loop, later wrote: “Tony’s heart was as big as his talent. His work, his generosity of spirit, and his good name will be long remembered.”

Chicago: Heart and Home

        Michele first met Tony at the grand opening of World Tattoo Gallery in early 1989 in the South Loop, a derelict neighborhood at the time. They became familiar with each other through the art world. Two days before Christmas, Michele lost her job. Tony heard about it and contacted her, asking if she would help him run World Tattoo Gallery. She was not interested in running the gallery long term but agreed to come in temporarily to stabilize things and help find someone capable of managing it properly while she continued looking for other work.

        As they began working together, they often butted heads. Tony was strong willed and wanted things done his way. Despite this, they developed a close friendship. Soon after, they began dating, and not long after that, they were married. The transition was quick, and their most natural and enduring dynamic was as life partners and spouses.

 

        In his early life, he stood in contrast to his siblings. According to Tony’s brother Jim, the whole family was in awe of his reach. People saw him like a Nelson Algren and Studs Terkel figure. “He was the child who once brought a dead skunk to school and asked a nun to bless it,” a telling act of rebellion that marked him as the family’s black sheep, albeit one with a silver lining.

        Tony delivered his observations like a well-constructed parfait, with his particular command of language. Tony was the kind of guy who would cross state lines to roast his high school principal brother at a retirement party—which he did. Tony did not hold back. His delivery was unfiltered, and soon the audience was in tears from laughter. He was also the kind of guy who would buy 200 donuts and juice for busloads of kids visiting World Tattoo Gallery from Beloit Memorial High School. The very school where his brother was principal early in his career.

        Dave Bonomi spoke about visiting Tony on the tenth floor of RUSH University Medical Center while he was waiting for a lung transplant. “The guy’s up there like Frank Sinatra,” he said. The receptionist told him she had seen people with lots of visitors but never so many for one person and that it was insane. Dave described Tony giving five-hundred-dollar etchings to a night nurse and sending hundreds of dollars of food and donuts to the staff each morning. He added, “I think cholesterol levels and BMIs went down when Tony passed.” While Tony was in the hospital, he handed out so many copies of his book “The Sun at the End of the Road” that the publisher came in and removed the remaining boxes.

        Tony’s son Max recalled planning to go to his first show at the Metro when he was 12 or 13, getting into punk and ska. Max remembers saying, “Well, I’m gonna go with you.” Max remembers begging him not to embarrass him and saying, “You can’t go! If I go, I’m going with my friends. If they know I’m with my dad, it’s gonna be embarrassing. Please don’t go.”

        Of course, he went. However, he stood in the back and read a book while Max got to go to these concerts. Max described his father this way: “My dad was not above puncturing his own ego in front of others. He did not assume his place or status was guaranteed and worked constantly to keep earning his place in the world.” Max also recalled childhood experiences in New York, including staying in Penn Jillette’s condo with his dad and the time he got to wrestle with Lou Reed, who called Max a vicious fighter. Max was four years old at the time.

        Tony’s commitment to Chicago ran deep. At the close of his remarks at the memorial, Dave Bonomi said, “Tony was Chicago, he literally had big shoulders, he cared so much about this city.” Former Mayor Lori Lightfoot admired Tony Fitzpatrick’s work for years. She especially loved his birds and found it touching that this big, burly, super-masculine guy focused his attention on these beautiful, delicate things—flowers, moths, and other vulnerable insect species like cicadas. When Lori was getting ready to take office as mayor, she was thrilled to have one of her favorite pieces installed in her office in a prominent place, on the wall behind her desk, there for the world to see anytime she was filmed in her office.

        Tony’s friend and fellow artist, Dave Roth, said it best: “Tony loved the City as much for its failings as its successes.”

 

The Poet, the Traveler, the Voice

        Tony’s creative life extended far beyond visual art. He was a regular guest every Thursday on Joan Esposito’s radio show “Live, Local and Progressive” on 820 AM, where he especially enjoyed discussing politics.

        As he once told the Reader: “I’ve never been able to do anything moderately. When I drank I was an alcoholic, when I used drugs I did too much… And that’s the same focus and energy I was able to funnel into making art.”

        Marc Smith, founder of the International Poetry Slam Movement, opened his tribute with, “Tony had a way of making something of anything and any moment.” At one point Tony and Marc were heading to New Orleans and as they were driving just outside of Clifton, Illinois, they stopped at a gas station. They come to find out there was a festival and a parade going on so they headed into town. Tony sought out the mayor and told him that they were doing a documentary for WTTW.

       As Marc told it, “-next thing I know, we’re on-stage performing [poetry and spoken] word for the farm community.” That same afternoon, further down the road, the two of them cornered Jeff Lockwood, owner of the Venice Café in St. Louis, and talked him into organizing an impromptu performance at his club for that evening. “Within two hours we pulled it together, kicked ass and stayed the night.” Then while heading through Memphis, they stopped at Graceland where Tony vowed to lay on Elvis’s bed. When the guards weren’t looking, Tony stepped over the “do not enter” crowd control ropes and sprawled out on the chaise lounge. Their traveling companion caught it all on tape. They finally arrived at their destination in New Orleans, performed their gigs, and wouldn’t you know it, the camera boy disappeared along with the evidence.

Standing for Chicago’s Artists

        Tony also had complicated feelings about the art world itself. Tony Karman has spent much of his life doing something Tony Fitzpatrick hated: international art fairs. Karman recalled that Tony was not really happy with art dealers, the art world, and the marketplace. “By association, I was the recipient of a challenge in every way for the greater good of a Chicago art fair and what it should do for the community,” Karman said. That first hard conversation could have turned into a long running argument, but ultimately it became a kind of partnership. In the end, what appeared to be a clash from the outside was two people pushing each other to do better by Chicago’s artists.

 

        “Car Wash” Formal title, date, medium, and dimensions unknown. Photo courtesy of Max Fitzpatrick.

        A glimpse of Tony’s aesthetic sensibility came through in a field trip he once agreed to take with a group of Italian exchange students to the Art Institute of Chicago. Tony decided this was not something he wanted to do alone, so he called his friend Dave Roth. Tony arrived with his son Max and the students in tow. Tony, Max, and Dave hung back as the students filed into the first Impressionist gallery. Tony glanced at Dave, took in the room, and said under his breath, “When I walk into this room it’s like someone is coming at me with a dental drill.” A little later, Dave wandered over to the small Van Gogh self-portrait, a personal favorite of his. As Dave was taking it in, Tony followed behind and let out this quiet “Yeah,” more like an exhale. Dave said, “The rest of the gallery just fell away, and for a moment, the painting’s devastating beauty took over.”

        One of Tony’s ongoing projects involved matchbooks collected by his childhood friend John Hogan’s father, Red, who had spent fifty years driving around the city repairing NCR cash registers. Everywhere he went, Red collected matchbooks. He tore out the matches and saved the covers in shoeboxes. Over time, the shoeboxes multiplied until they filled a large cardboard television box, tens of thousands of matchbooks in all.

        When Tony expressed interest, John went with him to pick some up. As John later recalled, it meant something to Red that Tony would use them in his work. Red had a photographic memory. As they sorted through the boxes one by one, he read each name aloud and recalled the day he picked it up. He remembered the date, the weather, who was screwing up politics in town, and sometimes who might have been sleeping with whom in the neighborhood. For a while, it became a ritual. Red, who had survived cancer, looked forward to those afternoons. Sorting through the matchbooks that would become part of Tony’s Wonder series gave him purpose. The project, in turn, gave Red a renewed sense of life.

A Legacy of Attention

        Max described how he and his sister Gabby started collaborating on film projects, combining her charisma and storytelling skills with his technical expertise. They just finished a short film called “Driven” about a rideshare driver who has a bad day, and it stars their father, Tony Fitzpatrick, in what is his final on-screen performance.

        Many people asked Michele what they could do in Tony’s name. She mentioned supporting the Bird Collision Monitoring Association, reflecting Tony’s lifelong care for birds. She also suggested eating at Peanut Park on Taylor Street. During Tony’s twenty-eight day stay at Rush Hospital, Dave Bonomi, the restaurant’s owner, arranged nightly meals for the entire ICU staff, about thirty-five people, for the duration of Tony’s hospitalization. Clearly not a one-off act of generosity, it deeply moved Tony, his family, and those who saw it unfold.

        As Tony once said: “I think despite all the trouble I got into, despite the alcoholism and a lot of the bad things, I had good stuff. I had a family—they’d be pissed at me—but they would never write me off, they’d never quit on me. That’s the difference between me and everybody else.”

 

 

        Tony Fitzpatrick saw things no one else saw—a chicken wearing a crown, angels masquerading as moths, the devastating beauty in a Van Gogh self-portrait, the potential in a young artist selling drawings in Washington Square Park. He saw the piping plover that needed protecting and the City of Chicago in all its failings and successes. He saw small, vulnerable things worth fighting for, and he never stopped looking, caring, and advocating.

        At the End of Tony’s memorial, Rick Kogan ended his speech with a familiar but appropriate quote from Shakespeare to describe Tony: “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women are merely players; they have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts.” He closes with, “And Tony played them all.” He begins clapping, and the entire room follows, clapping and cheering as Rick leaves the stage.

 

Evelyn Daitchman lives in Chicago and is happiest rock and fossil hunting, assembling memory jugs from found objects, and searching for materials to repurpose. She works with people to reimagine their homes using what they already possess, re-creating spaces that reflect their values and the lives they are living. She also has an archive of vintage and couture clothing, including antique Lyric Opera costumes, which she occasionally uses when styling for film, print, and special events.