New Robert Shetterly painting unveiled at ArtRage

March 31, 2015 - 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM


Robert Shetterly‘s paintings and prints are in collections all over the U.S. and Europe and for more than ten years he has been painting the series of portraits Americans Who Tell the Truth. The exhibit has been traveling around the country since 2003 (with a selection exhibited at the ArtRage Gallery in 2010). 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. His newest portrait being unveiled at ArtRage is of  Kristina Borjesson.

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 26 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.

Kristina Borjesson is a freelance journalist. She edited an award-winning collection of essays, Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press (2002), for which she wrote a chapter detailing her investigation of the TWA Flight 800 crash. Into the Buzzsaw won the Arthur Rowse Award for Press Criticism and an Independent Publishers Award in the current events category. The book was also a New York Public Library “Books to Remember”selection. In July 2013, TWA Flight 800 was released as a feature-length investigative film. Borjesson wrote, produced and directed the documenmtary which was released on the Epix premium cable channel. Borjesson’s second book, Feet to the Fire: The Media After 9/11, Top Journalists Speak Out contains a series of interviews with distinguished American journalists and news executives discussing the problems of press coverage of the run-up to the Iraq War as well as the war itself. Feet to the Fire also won the Independent Publishers Award in the current events category.

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.  For more info on the artist visit http://www.americanswhotellthetruth.org/the-artist