Artist Robert Shetterly recently joined students, faculty and staff in the Maxwell Auditorium for a wide-ranging discussion about his Americans Who Tell the Truth portrait collection, a sampling of which has been displayed in the school foyer for the past three years.

In the conversation led by Associate Dean Gladys McCormick, Shetterly spoke about the genesis of the project and how the exhibit at Maxwell exemplifies the intent behind his more than 260 portraits.

“When I go other places and people ask me, ‘What’s being done with this?’, this show is what I talk about first,” said Shetterly. “The reason is it makes explicit what has always been implicit; this is a conversation with the values and the origins of this country. What happened. What didn’t happen. Why it didn’t happen. What had to happen to make the real changes to get closer to actually living by the language of the Founding Fathers. So, to put these portraits around George Washington makes that all clear in a way that couldn’t happen any other place.”

The hour and a half-long event included stories about some of the portrait subjects, including Wendell Berry, Robin Wall Kimmerer and Shirley Chisholm—all currently displayed in Maxwell.

Shetterly also told the story behind the unique portrait of Dolores Volk holding a painting of Elizabeth Mumbet Freeman. Volk was a janitor who cleaned restrooms at Miami University of Ohio, where a collection of his portraits were on display.

Volk emailed Shetterly to tell him she was fascinated with the portraits and would often talk to them when she was working alone. She wondered, though, why he had not painted Elizabeth Mumbet Freeman.

“I had never heard of Elizabeth Mumbet Freeman, and I suspect that some of you have not either,” Shetterly told the audience. Freeman, who was born as an enslaved individual in 1742, was one of the first to file and win a freedom suit in Massachusetts. She filed the suit after attending the reading of the Declaration of Independence; the court ruling in her favor found slavery to be inconsistent with the 1780 Constitution of Massachusetts.

When Shetterly decided to paint Freeman, his only guide was a small watercolor painting on ivory. As a tribute to all those who have shared stories of inspiring individuals with him, he decided to paint Volk holding that original image.

The portrait includes a quote from Volk, asking why he had not yet painted Freeman. And a quote from Freeman: “Any time, any time while I was a slave, if one minute’s freedom had been offered to me, and I had been told I must die at the end of that minute, I would have taken it—just to stand one minute on God’s airth a free woman—I would.”

The Maxwell School added its first installment of Shetterly portraits in the foyer surrounding the lone statue of President George Washington and the Oath of the Athenian City-State in 2022. The exhibition is part of an effort to make Maxwell’s physical space more representative of its community and to promote conversations about citizenship.

In the summer of 2024, a new installment was added, including images of history makers such as investigative journalist Ida Tarbell and gold-medal Olympian and world heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali, who was stripped of his titles and sentenced to five years in prison for refusing to serve in the Vietnam War amid his fight for civil rights for Black Americans.

Shetterly’s visit was coordinated by McCormick, a historian who also serves as the school’s Jay and Debe Moskowitz Endowed Chair in Mexico-U.S. Relations, and Stephanie Williams, who works alongside McCormick as the school’s academic operations specialist. The Campbell Public Affairs Institute and history and political science departments sponsored the event.

After graduating from Harvard College—where he took some drawing courses, Shetterly moved to Maine in 1970, and taught himself drawing, printmaking and painting. While trying to become proficient in printmaking and painting, he illustrated widely. For 12 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.

Portraits from Americans Who Tell the Truth have appeared in 35 states, in a range of places including university museums, grade school libraries, sandwich shops, the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York City, and the Superior Court of San Francisco.

In 2016, Shetterly was the guest of the Maxwell-based Program for the Advancement of Research on Conflict and Collaboration for a talk titled “Art and Narrative Activism,” and in 2018 he was the guest of the Tanner Lecture Series on Ethics, Citizenship and Public Responsibility to coincide with a display of his portraits in the Schine Student Center.

By Cort Ruddy