Art and activism: portraits of ‘truth tellers’ arrive to Lake Placid

Maine artist’s “Americans Who Tell the Truth” paintings take center stage at John Brown Farm

By David Escobar

About 20 bold, colorful portraits have been installed surrounding the grave of John Brown at John Brown State Historic Site in Lake Placid. The paintings are part of a traveling exhibit titled “Americans Who Tell the Truth,” featuring the work of Maine-based artist Robert Shetterly.

Over the past two decades, Shetterly has painted nearly 300 portraits of activists and changemakers — people he said speak hard truths about justice, equity and democracy.

The series includes national icons like Frederick Douglass and the late Congressman John Lewis, as well as local Adirondack voices such as climate activist Bill McKibben and the late criminal justice advocate Alice Green.

The Explorer sat down with Shetterly to learn more about the exhibit and the inspiration behind his artwork.

The interview has been edited for space and clarity.

Q: You’ve been painting these portraits for more than 20 years. What inspired you to create them in the first place?

We live in an era of obsessive lying in our politics. But the stage has been set for the last 75 years by politicians and various groups lying to the American people without any accountability, which has got us into a very dark place, both politically and environmentally.

I kept thinking I needed to do something in response, with my art. I was not a political artist at that point. I was a surrealist. I loved ambiguity and mystery, looking at all kinds of human issues without saying “this is right” or “this is wrong.”

But when the run up to the Iraq War was happening, I was so full of rage that I kept thinking: I’ve got to do something with this enormous energy I’m feeling to this moment, but not negatively. I’ve got to take that energy and do something positive with it.

Finally, one day, it occurred to me I had a quote from Walt Whitman pinned up on the wall in my studio, the one that begins, “This is what you shall do: love the Earth, the Sun and the animals.” It’s Whitman’s commandment about how to live a good life. And I thought, I’ll paint his portrait, I’ll scratch those words into it, and I’ll feel better. 

What I was trying to do at first was just feel better. I wanted to find a way to feel less alienated from what this country was doing, to feel reconnected with something important about people in the country. There have always been loads of people who have insisted that we live up to our own ideals.

And I thought I’d paint a few of these portraits of people like that, and it worked wonders on me. I thought I would do a few portraits and then I would go back to whatever I was doing before, but that became impossible. Once I spent time with Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Jane Addams, Mother Jones and people like that, I didn’t want to be anywhere else. I wanted to be with them all the time, and it became an obsession in a way.

Q: The name of the series is “Americans Who Tell the Truth.” But who are some of these Americans? And what do you find is that “truth” that they’re telling?

On the one hand, you might say that it is sort of presumptuous for this guy who lives in a little town in Maine to assume that he knows who the “truth tellers” are. But lots of people know who the truth tellers are.

The truths I’m talking about are truths based around the essential values, or the founding values of the country, and whether they were lived up to by the people who wrote them or not.

There’s sort of three major sins of this country in relationship to its own ideals. One is native genocide. The other is slavery and racism. And the third is the obtuseness, the refusal to live by the laws of nature.

We chip away at working on racism issues and the relationships with not just people of color, but also Native people. And we’re in this existential moment about the environment. We’re being told to forget about it with incredible consequences for us, for our children, for our grandchildren and for the future of all species on this planet.

What becomes critical is who then insists that the country try to live up to its own ideals. If we’re going to talk about the pursuit of equality and justice and freedom that is available for everyone, who does that work?

Whether it’s about race, labor, the environment, gender or women’s rights, we don’t always know the truth. But what we do know is whether people are trying to get there or not, and if we see that we’re trying to work together to answer those problems, we can trust each other.

The other thing is, do we want to know who we really are. Do we want to know our identity? And if we answer yes to that, we have to know the truth about what we’ve done. I keep telling people this is not to say I want you to hate this country for what it hasn’t done. Instead, I want you to be inspired by the language of those ideals, which is so beautiful, and then be inspired by all the people who have sacrificed so much to make it real for everybody.

Q: What do these portraits look like?

They’re like a stripped-down version of a portrait. Classically, portraits often involve not just the portrayal of the person and their clothes, but often they’re set in an environment that helps enlarge the sense of who they are in relationship to the world.

I’m trying to do just the opposite of that. The only thing that is painted with great detail in the painting is the person’s face. And the point I want to make is that everything you need to know about this person is right there in that face. But I want no distractions except the language on the portrait. I’ve written the name of the person, and I’ve written a very serious quote from that person about an issue.

And so what I was trying to do is get people to stop long enough to look at the face, read the quote, think about what this might mean in relationship to themselves. Ask themselves, “This is a portrait that’s called Americans Who Tell the Truth. Is this the truth?” You might investigate that a little bit. Ask yourself, do I agree with that? And if I do agree with it, what should I do in response? I want these questions to be asked.

Q: There is this sort of directness that goes on with your art. What do you hope people take away from looking at a series of portraits like the ones you paint?

I don’t want this to be about me. Forget me and only see the person in the portrait. And then ask themselves, who is this person? Why are they saying that, what does it mean to me?

This is an act of love for the people who’ve had the courage to insist on trying to close the gap between what we say and what we do, and act with compassion and courage for other people. The people I paint do that all the time in one way or another. In a sense, my attempt at doing this becomes its own form of activism.

I hope my art does that for other people, that they look at these faces and they feel that they’ve been given permission to be more engaged, to be more courageous, to be more determined, to do the things that need to be done and to want to be part of this community of people who are those kinds of activists.

Selected portraits from Americans Who Tell the Truth will be on view at John Brown Farm in Lake Placid through October.

David Escobar is a Report For America Corps Member. He reports on diversity issues in the Adirondacks through a partnership between North Country Public Radio and Adirondack Explorer.