"Flacofolio": An Evening with Heide Hatry and Leonard Schwartz

Deutsches Haus at NYU presents a conversation with visual artist Heide Hatry and poet Leonard Schwartz about their newly published Flacofolio (Spuyten Duyvil, 2025)—a celebration of Flaco, the famous New York owl, and its life in the city, featuring images by Hatry and micro-essays by Schwartz.

About the book:

fosters the mystery of this haunting hero who so briefly graced and enraptured NYC. Replete with insightful spirit-treasures, this book throws up the bones of the many nourishing cultures from across the world, housed in one resilient city. Humor and tragedy interweave here. Flacofolio soars with luminous artwork, bringing passed wings flapping again into a vibrant Now. With a beak at the peak of acuity, Flaco perches atop urbanity with a wide Third Eye, and homes in on scintillating souvenirs. From the locked-down apartment window, who is the voyeur and who is the lantern-eyed? From the cage of constraint, who is the liberator, and who is being liberated?

About the speakers:

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 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.

Leonard Schwartz is the author of numerous books of poetry, including, most recently, Actualities I: Transparent, to the Stone, Actualities II and III: Two Burned Hotels, and Actualities IV/V Comic Earth (2021, 2022, 2023, Goats & Compasses). His three books with artist Simon Carr, Horse on Paper, Not a Snake, and Salamander: A Bestiary (Chax Press, 2017), are also out and about.

Attendance:

While NYU has ended COVID-19 related restrictions and policies, we continue to remind and recommend to members of the NYU community that they stay up-to-date on their boosters and stay home if they feel sick. Masks are always welcome.

Host or Publisher Deutsches Haus at NYU