#tony fitzpatrick

Tony Fitzpatrick, Michigan Bird, 2024

All of Fitzpatrick’s art speaks to me, but none more so than his Chicago pieces. This was as true while viewing Jesus of Western Avenue as it has ever been. I spent a lot of my visit to the CCMA noticing the neighborhoods, buildings, and signage depicted in various pieces—whether they were the focal image or appeared as smaller details—and quietly exclaiming: “Hey! I used to live right near there! I used to work in that building! I hung out at that place all the time!” And it was two of the pieces with signage as the focal point which resonated with me most strongly. Not only because of the visuals, but because of the poetry.

In the piece featuring the DriveOut Auto sign, Fitzpatrick’s words could have come straight from a Lou Reed song, or a Tom Waits song, or from a poet onstage at the Green Mill, performing with a backing jazz ensemble: Cowboys got off horses for a metallic-flake / midnight-blue Impala / with spinning rims and the homicidal snarl of a 386 trying on: steel, / Lord have mercy: steel. / Sequential lights—blinking the Western Avenue semaphore: The Midnight Auto. Open All Nite. / No Money Down.

In the piece featuring the sign for Barry’s Cut Rate Drugs, the poem jumped straight from the streets of Nelson Algren’s Chicago and into the present day: The wind knifed his face like a thousand tiny icicles; he felt his pocket, in a panic, to make sure his wake-up dope was still there… Down Milwaukee Avenue; he saw orange embers dance upward from a garbage-fire like petals from a dragon’s mouth… And for the first time in his life, he sang… And I stood there weeping in front of it; witnessing this small moment of dignity and beauty blossoming before me.

—Jessie Lynn McMains, from “Jesus of Western Avenue & The Apostles of Humboldt Park” (December 2021)