Photos provided by Fick Patterson
160 Years of Making...By Hand: Fick Patterson and The Sticks
What happens when a Sculpture student spends years training in a shop full of equipment most artists will never have access to again? School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) alum Fick Patterson (BFA 2022) didn’t want to find out the hard way. They built The Sticks, a community woodworking studio in Chicago, instead.
The idea didn’t arrive all at once. At SAIC, Patterson studied Sculpture broadly—metal, ceramics, and especially wood—working closely with woodshop faculty Paul Martin (who is also a faculty member) and Jeff Prokash, and taking courses like Martin’s Twist and Route and Instrument Making with Kitundu. What stuck with them wasn’t just the skills, but a problem nobody seemed to be solving: the shops were extraordinary, but there were few resources available for woodworking outside of the School.
“Once you leave SAIC, it’s nearly impossible to find access to shops that are anywhere near as nice,” Patterson said. “People tell you that while you’re there, but there were never many solutions offered for what came next. That stuck with me and eventually became part of the motivation to create one.”
After graduating, Patterson went to work managing the shops at Rebuilding Exchange, a nonprofit building-materials reuse center, where they helped run the education program. Watching strangers become a community around shared tools left an impression. When Rebuilding Exchange’s education department was shut down, Patterson took it as their sign to build something of their own.
They furnished the space gradually and resourcefully: a planer, lathe, bandsaw, and miter saw came from one of SAIC’s equipment fire sales, and additional machinery came at a discount when Rebuilding Exchange closed its doors. Patterson built out most of the physical space themself, with help from fellow alums Zola Rollins (BFA 2023) and Noam Nayberg (BFA 2022), while also teaching themself to build an e-commerce site, develop a brand, and write a marketing plan from scratch.
Today, The Sticks offers studio space, memberships, and classes to a wide cross-section of makers, from total beginners to people running businesses out of the shop. On any given day, someone might be building furniture, another person sculpting, and someone else picking up a drill for the first time.
“It’s really important to me to provide a high-functioning community shop,” Patterson said. “I wanted to create a space where people felt like they had access to the kind of workshop they deserved, a place that was organized, functional, and welcoming. I wanted to create the environment of a serious woodshop, but with room for playfulness and community.”
That philosophy shows up most clearly in the classroom. Patterson points to instructor Alex Jarus’s Log to Stool class as an example of what The Sticks is trying to do: take someone who has never touched a tool and send them home with proof that they’re capable of more than they thought.
“What sticks with me are the moments when someone walks into a class unsure whether they’ll succeed and leaves with something they built themselves,” Patterson said. “Watching people’s confidence grow is often more meaningful than the finished object.”
SAIC’s influence on The Sticks runs deeper than equipment and technique. Many of the instructors who teach there also work at SAIC, and Patterson credits illustrator and designer Lucas Flanders (BFA 2022), whom they met at the School, with shaping The Sticks’ branding. “The network is one of the biggest things SAIC gave me,” they said. “So many relationships I built there continue to support me.”
This fall, SAIC Galleries will present two interlinked exhibitions.
