Flacofolio

Micro-Essays / Leonard Schwartz Assemblages / Heide Hatry

Flaco, the eagle-owl liberated from his enclosure at the Central Park Zoo, captivated the city. He remained in Central Park for nine months living on his own, eventually also exploring nearby buildings and neighborhoods in Manhattan. In February 2024, one year after his escape, Flaco died after colliding with a building on the Upper West Side. Poet Leonard Schwartz and artist Heide Hatry explore the implications of the Eurasian eagle-owl’s sojourn.

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 booke-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 the evidential and affective power of materials, and celebrate and preserve the spirit of Flaco the beloved Eurasian 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

In this exceedingly beautiful work, Schwartz and Hatry have bequeathed to us a portrait of Flaco, the Eurasian eagle-owl – a companion for derelict times that we did not know we needed. Woven from the winged creature’s debris, the book tells a tragic tale; in Flaco’s inscrutable gaze, we glimpse our own refracted through the ash and bone of the eagle-owl’s remaindered substance. In this majestic and somber portrait of a homely fate, Schwartz and Hatry have composed a fable for the permanent apocalypse which is our now.
– Alexi Kukuljevic, author of Liquidation World: On the Art of Living Absently (MIT)

Hatry’s evocative images add an intense emotional dimension to this absorbing series of meditations on the life and (imagined) experience of the celebrated Eurasian eagle-owl.
– Errol Fuller, author of Extinct Birds, Lost Animals and Voodoo Salon