Get the latest Syracuse news delivered right to your inbox.
Subscribe to our newsletter here.

In 2001, two planes dove into the World Trade Center, killing over 2,000 people. Then, the US invaded Iraq, killing over 200,000 people.

In the year that followed, Robert Shetterly, a Maine-based multimedia artist and longtime activist in the Civil Rights Movement and Vietnam War protests, became increasingly distraught by American violence.

“I was so angry I was becoming a total nuisance to everyone around me,” Shetterly said. “I was in such a condition that I knew I had to do something positive with all that energy. And then one day I looked at my studio wall and there was a quote from Walt Whitman I had stuck up there years ago.”

He painted the American poet’s portrait, the first of over 260 portraits of “American Truth Tellers,” and counting. The paintings are cathartic for Shetterly — a way to mitigate his frustration and anger at America’s systems of power by focusing on the people trying to uphold the values of democracy, despite the subjects being historically left out of the American democracy narrative in the first place.

In his paintings, 23 of which are showing at ArtRage Gallery on Hawley Avenue until October 29, Shetterly uses the power of the portrait to shine a light on courageous local and national Americans, living and dead.

What started for Shetterly as a once-off painting of a hero has turned into a national organization: Americans Who Tell The Truth, which exhibits the portraits across the US and runs programs in education and community activism.

A portrait of Clifford Ryan, a native Syracusean and founder of OGs Against Violence, sets off the exhibit at ArtRage. After seeing a photograph of Ryan at an ArtRage exhibit last spring, Shetterly said he knew Ryan was exactly the figure he needed – someone on the streets taking direct action, being courageous and telling the truth.

With an earnest gaze against a burnt red background, the focus is heavy on Ryan’s eyes, then fades out to a sketched-out shirt and gestured hands. His name is etched above his head, as is the case for every painting in the series. Over his shirt is a quote from Ryan: “It’s so easy to hate but so hard to love.”

Shetterly has forged connections with Syracuse activists like Ryan in the time he has spent here. This is his third show at ArtRage Gallery, but he has also shown work at Syracuse University five times and has portraits on display in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. The only time all his portraits were exhibited at once — a total of 238 at the time — was at the Schine Student Center in 2018.

Though you wouldn’t tell from the consistency across his Americans Who Tell The Truth series or the sensitivity portrayed in each subjects’ face, Shetterly hadn’t painted a portrait before the series. He was known for his illustration, and had a gallery spot because of his drawings and etchings. After he painted Walt Whitman, Shetterly left the gallery and portraiture became his entire concentration.

A photo posted by artragegallery

Though “the portrait” is historically a means of bourgeois vanity and expressing esteem, Shetterly’s work recontextualizes the idea into a way to honor people who are consistently marginalized.

“(I’m) trying to demonstrate to this country that because the initial values of the country were never lived up to, purposefully, it took incredible courage and commitment from the people who had been left out, marginalized, ignored and not included in the ideals of the country,” Shetterly said. “The work to include them, to make the country honest, needed to be done by them.”

When he started, Shetterly had the goal of painting 50 portraits. He painted about 20 in the first year, he said, but as the project evolved he started taking more time with each, painting only five last year. The painting has become much more processional — Shetterly visits his living subjects as many times as possible while painting their portraits in person. Shetterly called the painting process “intimate” because he mostly uses his fingers directly on the canvas.

Though his historical subjects range from Frederick Douglass to Susan B. Anthony, Shetterly’s only non-living subject in this show is Paul Robeson.

To accurately portray his subject without a live sitting, Shetterly said he goes to the library to assemble as many photos of the subject as he can before scouring biographies and articles to fill in details of eye color and personality that the often black-and-white photographs leave out. A portrait can either take him a matter of days to months to complete, but the process is an essential part of his work.

“To paint a good portrait one must concentrate hard for many days to fully honor the subject of the portrait, to discover a likeness which not only looks like the person, but speaks like the person, radiates something essential about that person, from that unique person,” Shetterly said in his 2019 artist statement.

The breadth of issues Shetterly wants to shine light on is in full view in this exhibition through its variety of subjects.

Shetterly included Robin Wall Kimmer, a professor of environmental biology at SU; Bill Bigelow, champion of education reform and Alicia Garza, who coined the phrase Black Lives Matter. The project started as an anti-war protest, and that issue is still a major focus in this exhibit through portraits of Daniel Hale, Stacy Bannerman and Paul K. Chapel.

Though Shetterly never claimed his portraits of American heroes would create world peace, it’s hard to see how little has changed since 2001 — now, ice caps are melting, Russia is dropping bombs on Ukraine and constitutional rights are being repealed. But, in his gallery, surrounded on all sides by the kind eyes and fierce expressions of American lawyers, writers, educators and more, it was hard to think of all that. Instead, the focus was on Nikki Giovanni’s poetry, lives saved by Dawn Wooten’s whistleblowing and money raised for Laos by Channapha Khamvongsa.

“Each portrait is like a lifeboat,” Shetterly said. “When I’m floundering and I feel like I’m about to sink, I find somebody to pull me back to the surface.”

Published on September 13, 2022 at 10:56 pm

Contact Sydney: sypollac@syr.edu