April Fitzpatrick

April Fitzpatrick is a licensed mental health counselor, board certified art therapist, mixed media visual artist, and CEO of Pineapples with Purpose, LLC, a mobile mental health service that introduces art therapy to communities impacted by race-based traumatic stress. Her current work calls into question the invisibility of race based traumatic stress (RBTS) and using the pineapple as a guiding metaphor to assess the core of racial trauma. Weaving historical narratives, her work is a conversation between self, people, and place to deepen our understanding of lifeworlds. She combines contemporary abstraction with experimental narrative to capture the layered realities of Blackness, racial trauma, and oppression alongside the history and evolution of cultural memory and symbolism. Fitzpatrick’s principle purpose is helping individuals uncover, assess, and externalize challenges that affect their overall wellbeing.

Fitzpatrick’s work has been featured in the Tallahassee Democrat, the Tallahassee International Airport, Canvas Rebel, Artful Infrastructure, Black Superwoman Chronicles, ArtPlace America, Black Minds Mag: Issue 2, Art Seen: The Curator’s Salon Magazine, and ART4EQUALITY x LIFE, LIBERTY, PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS Exhibition Catalog.

April’s most recent accomplishments include being Arts in Medicine Fellow (AIM), Baldwin for the Arts Fellow (BFTA), and New Leaders Council Fellow (NLC). She believes that in order to turn pain into purpose, you must  “Make Room for Your Crown!”

April’s work uses auto and medical ethnographic processes to confront the invisibility of race-based traumatic stress (RBTS). Investigating the insidiousness of racial messaging, her work sits at the intersection of cultural memory and symbolism. Together, these processes coalesce personal experiences of RBTS, client-practitioner relationships,histories of racial violence and the contemporary impact of racial trauma. April’s practice, as both a process and product, visually translates the complexities of RBTS using the pineapple as a guiding metaphor. Employing art therapy as a tool for storytelling, she creates space to construct new narratives and progress racial healing. Deepening her work as a form of social practice, she facilitates the reimagining of how mental health is addressed in real communities in real time.