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Tony Fitzpatrick's Secret Birds Come Alive With Poems, Pigeons and Poi Dog

By Mark Konkol | July 29, 2014 6:23am
 Ukrainian Village artist Tony Fitzpatrick celebrates his final show of drawings in Chicago, "The Secret Birds," at the Poetry Foundation gallery.
Ukrainian Village artist Tony Fitzpatrick celebrates his final show of drawings in Chicago, "The Secret Birds," at the Poetry Foundation gallery.
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Tony Fitzpatrick

THE LOOP — Tony Fitzpatrick has been obsessed with birds since he was a punk kid, and his grandmother, bless her heart, told him, “For the price of a piece of bread you can hear God sing.”

So it’s fitting that Fitzpatrick’s final show of drawings in Chicago before he packs up his studio and flies south to New Orleans forever will feature starlings, nightingales and cardinals — all in various states of unrest inspired by his vivid and very Chicago imagination.

And on Thursday, the Ukrainian Village artist will bring those beautiful dastardly birds to life in “The Secret Birds: New Drawings by Tony Fitzpatrick," a multimedia performance of poetry, storytelling and song at the Poetry Foundation gallery Downtown.

Fitzpatrick plans to read a few of his poems about his secret birds that amount to “a meditation on what birds mean in our life and our world — including a Chicago perspective. “

His pal, Steppenwolf artistic director Martha Lavey, is set to act out the innermost thoughts of “the last passenger pigeon alive." And Frank Orrall of Poi Dog Pondering will play.

It’s sure to be a spectacle — in that special way that only a Tony Fitzpatrick production can be.

"The Secret Birds: New Drawings by Tony Fitzpatrick" is scheduled for 7:30 p.m. Thursday at the Poetry Foundation, 61 W. Superior St. Admission is free.

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