All Americans Who Tell the Truth titles come signed and are able to be personalized.
Portraits of Peacemakers
Essays, portraits, and profiles of fifty American peace activists.
This third volume in the Americans Who Tell the Truth series features Robert Shetterly’s striking color portraits and profiles of fifty peace activists as well as essays by Chris Hedges, Kali Rubaii, Paul K. Chappell, Medea Benjamin, Alice Rothchild, and David Swanson. The people honored in this book approach peacemaking in manifold ways. They have told the truth about the lies enabling war, they have protested, they have gone to jail for peace, made art imbued with the suffering of war, the stupidity of war and its cruelty, taught the curricula of peace, exposed the unspeakable wounds and trauma visited on children in war, and shown how environmentally historically, and psychologically wars never end. They have also shown how warmongers promote and profit obscenely from the business of industrial killing, how atrocity is celebrated as heroic. They resist, resist, resist. They act with love.
Portraits of Earth Justice
Five compelling essays and fifty stunning portraits and profiles of American environmental activists.
This second volume in the Americans Who Tell the Truth series features Robert Shetterly’s magnificent color portraits and profiles of fifty environmental and climate activists—people who diagnose the truth of the greatest crisis humanity has ever confronted and take action. The book also features original essays by revered environmentalists Bill McKibben, Leah Penniman, Diane Wilson, Bill Bigelow, and Robin Wall Kimmerer, whose words illuminate the plight and its causes, and point a way forward.
Along with the genocide of Indigenous peoples and the institution of slavery, the third tragic and persistent mistake of the leaders of this country was to attempt to separate economic and political culture from the laws of nature—to operate on the basis that nature could be exploited endlessly for profit. The damage done to the Earth and to the future of life on the planet is incalculable. The people portrayed here have bought warnings, offered solutions, and organized movements to restore ecological sanity.
Portraits of Racial Justice
A vivid portrait collection of past and present Americans speaking truth to power.
The first volume of Robert Shetterly’s Americans Who Tell the Truth portrait series, Portraits of Racial Justice takes a multimedia, interdisciplinary approach, blending art and history with today’s issues concerning social, environmental, and economic fairness. Shetterly’s paintings, as well as profiles of those portrayed, illuminate a community of people not only willing to recognize the shortcomings of America’s history, but most importantly, individuals who offer their visions of a better world moving forward.
Starting with Michelle Alexander and ending with Dave Zirin, the diverse array of fifty full-color portraits spans multiple generations and struggles. This volume also includes four original opening essays on racial justice in the United States by Ai-jen Poo, Dave Zirin, Sherri Mitchell, and Rev. Lennox Yearwood, Jr., which provide an intersectional response to the long-term goal of diversity and inclusion.
As Shetterly says, “without activism, hope is merely sentimental.” Portraits of Racial Justice, Shetterly’s homage to transformative game-changers and status-quo fighters, provides the inspiration necessary to spark social change.
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 and illustrated the National Society’s newspaper, Audubon Adventures, and approximately 30 books.
Robert’s paintings and prints are in collections all over the U.S. and Europe. A collection of his drawings and 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 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.
Shetterly has engaged in a wide variety of activist 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 and then to Palestine – twice with Lily Yeh – for art projects in refugee camps. Much of his current work focuses on the intersections of climate change, systemic racism, and militarism.
For 25 years he was the President of the Union of Maine Visual Artists (UMVA) and a producer of the UMVA’s Maine Masters Project, an on-going series of video documentaries about Maine artists.
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, Main