Guests in a Foreign Land. Art Talk with Robert Bunkin

Will focus on artists who were guests of a community, including Gentile Bellini, a Venetian painter in the court of the Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II; Rembrandt's portraits of Amsterdam's Sephardic community; Velazquez's portraits of court dwarfs; Giuseppe Castiglione's paintings for the Qianlong Emperor of China; Joshua Johnson's (a free black artist working in Baltimore) portraits of Baltimore's white middle-class; Gericault's portraits of mentally ill patients; Catlin's portraits of North American Natives; Laura Knight's portraits of a British Roma community; Percy Leason's portraits of Australian Aborigines and Winold Reiss's portraits of Harlem Renaissance intellectuals. Come to learn about these often surprising images and their rich history!

Robert Bunkin is a painter, curator, art historian, and educator with a BS from CUNY and an MFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University. He has taught art history and studio art in several NYC art schools, universities, colleges, and museums.

Gentile Bellini, Seated Scribe, c. 1480 Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston

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