Seaside Series: Robert Shetterly
July 23 @ 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
Americans Who Tell the Truth
Robert Shetterly will give a talk about his portrait series Americans Who Tell the Truth and take us behind the scenes of his creative process, followed by Q&A and a book signing.
Robert Shetterly was born in 1946 in Cincinnati, Ohio. He graduated in 1969 from Harvard College with a degree in English Literature. After college and moving to Maine in 1970, he taught himself drawing, printmaking, and painting.
For more than 20 years he has been painting the series of portraits Americans Who Tell the Truth. These portraits have been traveling around the country since 2003. Venues have included everything from university museums and grade school libraries to sandwich shops, the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York City, and the Superior Court in San Francisco. To date, the exhibits have visited 35 states. In 2005, Dutton published a book of the portraits by the same name. In 2006, the book won the top award of the International Reading Association for Intermediate non-fiction. New Village Press in New York City is published a series of themed books on the portraits. Each volume contains 50 portraits. The series includes Portraits of Racial Justice (2021), Portraits of Earth Justice (2022), and Portraits of Peace Makers (2024).
The portraits have given Shetterly an opportunity to speak with children and adults all over this country about the necessity of dissent in a democracy, the obligations of citizenship, sustainability, US history, and how democracy cannot function if politicians don’t tell the truth, if the media don’t report it, and if the people don’t demand it.
Richard Kane’s film Truth Tellers about the Americans Who Tell the Truth project premiered in the fall of 2021 and has been showing across the country. In July 2022 it played at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.
Robert Shetterly lives with his partner Gail Page, a painter and children’s book writer and illustrator, in Brooksville, Maine.
The rain venue for all Seaside Series programs is SPL, 64 Main Street.