Robert Shetterly was one of thousands of young Americans in the late 1960s and 1970s who moved back to the land, becoming self-sufficient, building a home, raising food and living off the grid. He lived in Maine and supported himself through a variety of jobs, while teaching himself to paint.
Eventually Shetterly was able to make a living as a commercial artist. But almost 25 years ago, he painted a portrait of Walt Whitman to express his outrage about the U.S. government’s invasion of Iraq. That set him on a course to create an ever-growing gallery of portraits called “Americans Who Tell the Truth,” to inspire what he calls courageous citizenship.
The project, which channels the “power of art to illuminate the ongoing struggle to realize America’s democratic ideals,” offers a variety of ways to engage with his portraits through exhibits and educational programs. Between The Lines’ Melinda Tuhus spoke with Shetterly about his personal development as a portrait painter and discusses his goal of inspiring courageous citizenship.
ROBERT SHETTERLY: My life changed in regard to this project and portrait painting in the runup to the Iraq War right after 9/11. I was so angry, so frustrated, so alienated from this country because of the lie that was going on to produce that war and the fact that the major media was letting them get away with it. That I thought I either had to leave the country or I had to do what I do best, which is paint to somehow have a voice at that time. And I also knew, and this was very important, that it was not going to do anybody any good, me or anybody would look at what I was doing if I just showed how angry I was, if I just showed how full of grief I was, I realized that I had to take all that negative energy and use it in a positive way and I couldn’t for some time figure out what to do.
And then it occurred to me, well, why don’t I just surround myself with portraits of people who make me feel good about this country and good about the struggle to have this country live up to its own values? And that’s where the project started. And that’s when I taught myself how to paint portraits and I began with a portrait of Walt Whitman. I thought I’d paint five or six portraits and that would be it. It was really a therapy project at being just to find a way to come to terms with being in a country that was committing war crimes. And so I did that and all of a sudden the reaction to them was so much stronger when I showed them the first few portraits than I expected. And there was immediately an awful lot of people who were feeling the same nostalgia for a country they thought they lived in as I was, and soon was getting invited to bring the portrait into schools and talk about them, go to libraries and talk about them, and it just kept growing from there.
MELINDA TUHUS: How many have you painted up to now?
ROBERT SHETTERLY: It’s around 280, I think. I sort lost count at the moment. I think it’s a little over 280. There are a few new ones that I haven’t put up on the website yet. We have quite a team now that, I mean a little staff that works on the website and writes bios and arranges for the educational work and all the different things that have spun out of this project, have really made it a much bigger thing than it was originally. I mean, the portraits travel all over the country to museums and colleges and libraries and community centers, churches as much as possible. I trundle after them and talk about who the people are and why I painted them and what they mean for all of us in terms of maintaining a level of democratic sanity.
And pretty soon I was being invited places and people were paying me to speak and that kind of thing. And it gradually has developed into, I mean, I don’t make much money, but I survived and that’s all I want. I mean, what I want is to be able to keep on doing this and keep painting these pictures and keep telling the stories, especially to kids because the object of it now in schools is to inspire what we call courageous citizenship, to present these models of people who are not superheroes. They’re regular folks with flaws in their lives who did a courageous thing or things to try to make more justice in the world.
MELINDA TUHUS: I was scanning through them after we set up the interview. I knew I would say certainly more than half, but then there were others I didn’t know. I dunno. Can you say more about the process by which you picked the people?
ROBERT SHETTERLY: Sure. I mean, at the beginning I was picking all these 19th century icons. After Walt Whitman, I painted Frederick Douglas and Harriet Tubman and Susan B. Anthony and Mother Jones and Jane Adams just like that. People that most of us know, although I was discovering that I knew them as names and I knew a name attached with an issue, but I knew nothing about their lives, really. I was having to read all these biographies to find out who these people really were and how complicated their lives often were and what their struggles were.
Once it started to get a little notoriety, I was being bombarded and I still am with suggestions and requests. “Why haven’t you painted so-and-so” is often somebody I’ve never heard of. If I look at my own gallery, I didn’t know these people either. I mean, I’ve been doing an awful lot of reading, but also I get so many suggestions. And often the suggestions are incredible about stories we should have been taught in middle school or high school or college about our own history, because often these verily barely known people have had huge effects on our history.
For more information, visit americanswhotellthetruth.org.
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