The Secret Birds: New Drawings by Tony Fitzpatrick
Detail of collage featuring a large bird figure and the text, "A Secret Bird."
Tony Fitzpatrick draws on his talents as an actor, dramatist, poet, and visual artist for an elaborate array of work with Poetry magazine and the Poetry Foundation this summer. The Secret Birds, a clutch of fantastic creatures of the artist’s own invention, is Fitzpatrick’s final show of drawings before leaving Chicago for New Orleans, where he will study ornithology and natural history at the University of New Orleans. The work is interlaced with poetry, ephemera, and his institutional memory of the city itself: “a bird made from bright planets.” In a multimedia feature, Fitzpatrick discusses these drawings.
Exhibit Hours
Monday - Friday, 11 AM - 4 PM
Saturday, August 16, 10 AM - 2 PM
During any of our evening events
Tony Fitzpatrick was born on the South Side of Chicago, the son of a burial vault salesman. Fitzpatrick was routinely suspended from Catholic School on bad behavior. On those days he would ride along with his father to sales appointments and listen to stories of life and of Chicago. Birds were especially important to Fitzpatrick because, as his grandmother used to say, “For the price of a piece of bread you can hear God sing.”