Exhibition/Sale of Artists' Books - COLOR: ARTISTS' BOOKS FROM AROUND THE WORLD - Opens Friday June 27 at 4:00 pm and runs through Monday, September 1st

Courtesy of Ursus Rare Books in New York, a selection of museum quality books that contain original graphics by Josef Albers, INTERACTION OF COLOR, Georges Rouault, the original maquette for CIRQUE DE L'ETOILE FILANTE; other books will include works by artists Joan Miro, Sam Francis, Andy Warhol, Jim Dine, Robert Rauschenberg, Rufino Tamayo, and many other modern masters.

Booksigning and Reading - SHAMANS OF THE FOYE TREE: GENDER, POWER, AND HEALING AMONG CHILEAN MAPUCHE - Ana Mariella Bacigalupo - Thursday, July 24 from 5:00 to 6:00 pm

Drawing on anthropologist Ana Mariella Bacigalupo's fifteen years of field research, Shamans of the Foye Tree: Gender, Power, and Healing among Chilean Mapuche is the first study to follow shamans' gender identities and performance in a variety of ritual, social, sexual, and political contexts.

To Mapuche shamans, or machi, the foye tree is of special importance, not only for its medicinal qualities but also because of its hermaphroditic flowers, which reflect the gender-shifting components of machi healing practices. Framed by the cultural constructions of gender and identity, Bacigalupo's fascinating findings span the ways in which the Chilean state stigmatizes the machi as witches and sexual deviants; how shamans use paradoxical discourses about gender to legitimatize themselves as healers and, at the same time, as modern men and women; the tree's political use as a symbol of resistance to national ideologies; and other components of these rich traditions.

The first comprehensive study on Mapuche shamans' gendered practices, Shamans of the Foye Tree offers new perspectives on this crucial intersection of spiritual, social, and political power.

Ana Mariella Bacigalupo is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University at Buffalo and summer scholar at the School of Advanced Research.

Booksigning and Discussion - STANDING IN THE LIGHT: MY LIFE AS A PANTHEIST - Sharman Apt Russell - Friday, July 25th, 5:00 pm

"Everything is connected, and the web is holy." So wrote Marcus Aurelius, the starting point of Sharman Apt Russell's wise and haunting new memoir about her life as a pantheist. Perhaps no other religious philosophy is as simple and inclusive as pantheism. What is, right now, is divine; there is no god apart from the universe itself. In Standing in the Light, Russell explores the history of this tradition from the Stoic philosophers to the Transcendentalists while reflecting on her own life during a year spent in the mountains and desert of southwestern New Mexico. A season of banding birds, the migration of sandhill cranes, the panicked charge of a young javelina-nature provides the inspiration for meditations on subjects ranging from Buddhist thought to the death of her father, from the Quaker tradition to the sadness of children leaving home, from global warming to the ineffable loneliness of human experience. With a humane heart, an inquisitive mind, and luminescent prose, Sharman Apt Russell invites skeptics, scientists, and seekers everywhere to join her in her exploration of the soul of pantheism.

Sharman Apt Russell is the author of several books, including Hunger and Songs of the Fluteplayer, which won the Mountains and Plains Booksellers Award. She has written for publications including Discover and Nature Conservancy, and currently contributes to OnEarth, the magazine for the National Resource Defense Council. Russell teaches creative writing at Western New Mexico University and at Antioch University in Los Angeles, California. She lives in Silver City, New Mexico.