Join us at Center for Book Arts on Monday, April 14 at 6 PM for an in-person double book launch celebrating FLACOFOLIO—a collection of micro-essays by poet Leonard Schwartz paired with assemblages by artist Heide Hatry—and FLACO: The Owl Who Escaped Captivity and Won the Hearts of the World, an inspiring visual documentation of Flaco’s remarkable year of freedom, edited by Jonathan Hollingsworth.
About the Publications
Flacofolio
Micro-essays by poet Leonard Schwartz and assemblages in altered books by artist Heide Hatry.
4.5 x 7”, 100 pages, 2025
FLACO: The Owl Who Escaped Captivity and Won the Hearts of the World
edited by Jonathan Hollingsworth and a foreword by Carl Safina
8.5 x 10.5”, 244 pages, 300 four-color plates, 2025
This remarkable encounter between a people and a bird, and between a poet and a visual artist, is also a beautiful ode to New York City. It is filled with surprising insights and startling cultural references. All in all, it makes for a perfect gift to give a lover of nature, or a spiritual treasure to hold onto and cherish.
– Phillip Lopate, author of Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan
Books are spaces of memory, an idea poignantly embodied in the book-based assemblages that Heide Hatry has set in dialogue with Leonard Schwartz’s suite of poems. Hatry’s cut, collaged, vividly staged scenes, part reliquary and part theatrical vignette, demonstrate exquisitely and deliberately the evidential and affective power of materials, and celebrate and preserve the spirit of Flaco the beloved Eagle Owl, whose symbolic freedom captivated New York. Their rich archaeology connects Flaco with an intertextual field of associations and references through which the artist invokes her personal memory of a shared cultural experience.
– Joanna Drucker, author of The Century of Artist’s Books and The Book as Art.
Heide Hatry and Flaco the Owl, what a perfect couple. Hatry has also escaped from her artworld cage and what better tribute to nature's brave non-human souls than her witty and heartfelt assemblages.
– Lucy R. Lippard, art critic, activist, curator, and writer.
FLACO is a comprehensive visual book which captures Flaco’s incredible year of freedom, documented by many of the key photographers who followed his sojourns across the city. The book highlights the work of artists, across a range of media and practices – from totem poles to stitchwork – who were inspired by Flaco’s story, and it is the sole publication to feature the memorial objects left at the base of Flaco’s favorite oak in Central Park, after his tragic passing.
Almost from the moment he was reported loose, Flaco became a metaphor. The only member of his Eurasian species suddenly free in America, with no experience at making a living in New York, Flaco was the kind of immigrant that the city has long known and nurtured.
– Carl Safina
About the Authors
Leonard Schwartz is the author of numerous books of poetry, including Actualities I: Transparent, to the Stone, Actualities II and III: Two Burned Hotels, and Actualities IV/V Comic Earth (2021, 2022, 2023, Goats & Compasses). He edited and co-translated Benjamin Fondane’s Cine-Poems and Other, with New York Review Books.
Heide Hatry is a NYC-based German artist, former rare bookseller, and best known for her work employing animal parts or other discarded, disdained, or “taboo” materials. She has curated numerous exhibitions (including "One of a Kind", Unique Artists' Books) and has shown her work at museums and galleries all over the world. She has produced more than 200 artist’s books, edited dozens of art catalogues, and four of her larger projects (Skin, Heads and Tales, Not a Rose, and Icons in Ash) have been documented in monographic books.
Hatry has been featured in The Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, Art in America, Art News, Sculpture Magazine, The Huffington Post, Musée Magazine, Arte Al Límite, Boston Globe, Fox News, NY1, New York Post, and other media.
She is the founder of ICONS IN ASH, a social art project devoted to helping people contend with loss, and of POLAR BEAR FEST, a Lumbung art initiative created to foster community while fighting the climate crisis.
Jonathan Hollingsworth is a New York City-based writer, photographer, editor and publishing veteran whose recent publications include FLACO: The Owl Who Escaped Captivity and Won the Hearts of the World and Call Me Timothee: The Timothee Chalamet Look-Alike Competition, both from Blurring Books. Previous monographs include Left Behind: Life and Death Along the U.S. Border (Dewi Lewis, UK) and What We Think Now: Young People’s Response to the War in Iraq. His work has been published in The New York Times, The Independent, The Sunday Times Magazine (London), BBC News Magazine, Die Welt and Photo District News, among others. He has had solo exhibitions at the UC Riverside / California Museum of Photography, Santa Fe Art Institute, and Center for Photography at Woodstock. He currently lives in Brooklyn with a ginger cat and orange Naugahyde couch.
$0