Robert Shetterly
James Baldwin, Acrylic on wood panel, 37” x 31”
Robert Shetterly was born in 1946 in Cincinnati, Ohio. He graduated in 1969 from Harvard College with a degree in English Literature. At Harvard he took some courses in drawing which changed the direction of his creative life -- from the written word to the image. Also, during this time, he was active in Civil Rights and in the Anti-Vietnam War movement.
After college and moving to Maine in 1970, he taught himself drawing, printmaking, and painting. While trying to become proficient in printmaking and painting, he illustrated widely. For twelve years he did the editorial page drawings for The Maine Times newspaper, illustrated National Audubon’s children’s newspaper Audubon Adventures, and approximately 30 books.
A collection of his drawings & etchings, Speaking Fire at Stones, was published in 1993. He is well known for his series of 70 painted etchings based on William Blake’s “Proverbs of Hell”, and for another series of 50 painted etchings reflecting on the metaphor of the Annunciation.
His painting has tended toward the narrative and the surreal, however, for nearly 20 years he has been painting the series of portraits Americans Who Tell the Truth. The exhibit has 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 31 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.
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.
Shetterly has engaged in a wide variety of political and humanitarian work with many of the people whose portraits he has painted. In the spring of 2007, he traveled to Rwanda with Lily Yeh and Terry Tempest Williams to work in a village of survivors of the 1994 genocide there. Much of his current work focuses on climate change, and on the continuation of systemic racism in the US particularly in relation to the school-to-prison pipeline.
From 1990 until 2015, he was the President of the Union of Maine Visual Artists (UMVA), and continues as a producer of the UMVA’s Maine Masters Project, an on-going series of video documentaries about Maine artists.
Next year New Village Press in NYC will begin publishing a series of themed books based on the Americans Who Tell the Truth portraits. And Robert is currently writing a book on the relationship of courage to social justice.
Awards and commendations:
In 2005, the Maine People’s Alliance awarded him its Rising Tide award. Also in 2005, he was named an Honorary Member of the Maine Chapter of Veterans for Peace. In May 2007, Rob received a Distinguished Achievement Award from the University of Southern Maine and gave the Commencement Address at the University of New England which awarded him an Honorary Doctorate in Humane Letters. In 2009, he was named a Woodrow Wilson Visiting Fellow that enables him to do week long residences in colleges around the country. The University of Maine at Farmington awarded him an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters in 2011. Robert Shetterly lives, with his partner Gail Page, a painter and children’s book writer and illustrator, in Brooksville, Maine.
