Welcome to The NewsHouse. I'm Taylor Epps and I'm joined by activist and
artist Robert Shetterly whose portrait series "Americans Who Tell the Truth" is a
part of a special exhibit and talk here at Syracuse University.Thank you so much
for being here oh thank you, Taylor delighted to be here
So I want to start by talking about what inspired your series "Americans Who Tell
the Truth" but you started in the early 2000s where did the original idea come
from and when did you decide it wasn't just gonna be one single painting let me
say first that I actually didn't want to do this I mean I was another kind of
artist I'd I'm a self-taught artist I spent a lot of years trying to develop a
voice and a technique and it really what came out of me was surrealism you know
people being able to paint about ambiguity and mystery and trying to
layer it with all kinds of metaphors and have humor but have darkness and light
have irony have all kinds of references in the pictures and you know challenge
my audience to go with me if they could or find their own stories in it I love
doing that what happened was in right after 9/11 actually within a few days or
even a few hours in some cases people from the Bush administration and this is
in you know 2001 January to September 2001 began talking about a response to
9/11 being to attack the country of Iraq Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 Iraq
did not have weapons of mass destruction Iraq didn't have al-qaeda I mean all
these claims were being made and I've lived in this country long enough and
seen enough of this stuff to know when a government is lying I mean they may just
say that everybody's government lies in various times to protect interests to
protect it to be secret to do whatever they do but they often sometimes they
might think it's a good reason usually it's not a good reason I mean why do
people lie but anyway um I was so distraught I was so angry I was so full
of grief you know when you think about starting a war as they wanted to do
attack this country that not attacked us they're going to be
millions of victims you know our soldiers their soldiers and
lots of civilians one can imagine taking on that moral burden if it's absolutely
necessary this was a case where it was absolutely not necessary
there was no reason I mean good reason there might have been geopolitical
reasons there might have been energy reasons and as oil but there was not a
good reason for a war and I kept thinking what can I do I felt terribly
isolated not just in a little town and I living in Maine but I felt isolated from
this country I felt alienated deeply alienated and I thought I've got to find
some way to reconcile myself back to this country and you know through and
find a voice at this moment and I couldn't figure out how to do it at
first because I I was following my emotions which were anger and grief and
I thought I know enough about art and I've done this for a long enough time to
know that nobody wants to have anger and grief shoved in their face it just
doesn't work and I thought well okay I've got to find another way and finally
it occurred to me that was kind of an art therapy project was to surround
myself with people that make me feel good about the country rather than you
know rant anymore about the people who didn't and that's where this came from I
had a in my own studio I have lots I have a wall pinned up with other
people's paintings quotes from places you know just odds and ends things I
find interesting I just stick them up there and one day I was just looking at
that wall and there was a quote that I'd put there years ago from Walt Whitman
you know America's arguably greatest poet and I read the
quote that I'd put there and I thought I'm gonna paint his portrait I'm gonna
scratch those words into the portrait and I'm gonna feel better and that's all
I needed to that moment and that's where it all began and at the moment at the
time it was one picture I was gonna make that picture that was gonna do the job
for me and then it was gonna go on with my life as a surreal
but in the process of painting that picture and noticing how my home psyche
changed by being in relationship with Walt Whitman and what he was saying
about how we have to be in relationship with every living thing in the world and
and feeling this sense of I mean he may be a the greatest Democrat a small d--
democratic-- of this country ever you know because he didn't just love all
people he loves all living things and realized that we have to be in
relationship to all living things not just other people if we want to survive
on this planet I mean he was prescient about any way that that picture affected
me deeply it affected the people I showed it to deeply and then it suddenly
sort of talked back to me and said you've got other work to do here
paint a few more of these and I decided I would paint 50 portraits I had never
painted a portrait in my life I was gonna paint 50 portraits I was gonna
call them Americans to tell the truth and then I was going to give the whole
thing away and that actually made me feel the freest I've ever felt in my
life so you're gonna start with those 50 but
now you're at 238 that's right so why do you think what do you think make this
project so prolific what I wanted to do after I started to get into it a little
bit was paint portraits of people who have tried to close the gap in this
country between what we say is the country you know what the ideals of the
country are and the way they actually play out you know like we wrote a
declaration and we wrote a constitution that talks about the rule of law and
justice for everybody that didn't happen why didn't it happen
you know and then if it's going to be if we're gonna be reconnected to the actual
sentiment of those ideals how is that going to happen it's not going to
because happen because rich white guys wake up one day and say oh my god we
forgot to free the slaves we forgot to give women the right to vote you know
that isn't what's going to happen it's going to be happen because the
marginalized people who believe in that language even more
deeply than the people who wrote it I mean that's the important thing they
believe it more deeply than the people who wrote er are going to demand that it
be made real for them and it became clear to me as I started to do this that
I'm gonna keep doing this until I run out of subjects in a sense of people who
are still fighting that battle to close the gap between the ideals and the
reality and there's just no end of it I mean it every day a new story comes to
me somebody else send me something say you've got to paint this person most
often I've never heard of that person but a lot of times I'll you know look up
the person and say yeah that's a subject that I haven't really touched yet
like I just recently painted Toronto Burke you know the founder of the the me
to movement well that wasn't a movement ten years ago there wasn't a face to go
with it and now there is and there she is and I've painted her and so each you
know things keep happening like that and I think at some points I think well okay
if there's enough you know but the next day something happens and somebody shows
a kind of courage or kind of determination or you know something that
affects me strongly and then I think oh I've got to do that so I'll never live
long enough to I mean I've got now hundreds of names on a list of potential
portraits I'll never do it so you talked about finding that voice and you were
able to channel your anger and turn it into what has become your life's work
for young people or college students who might be angry or concerned about the
current political climate how you recommend they channel their concerns
well I would do I mean I recommend doing something like what I did is that
looking at trying to find you know examine your own anger
I mean anger is a good thing it's not like it's a bad thing
whenever there's injustice one needs to be angry the question is what you do
with it and then is to find some way and think carefully about this I thought
that is able to use your your passion about what's wrong you know what caused
the injustice to remedy it in some way if you've got a
you know there's a grievance you know find a way to remedy the grievance and
whether it's I mean art as a way writing is away marching in the street is a way
and it's particularly good if you can find a group you know because one of the
that one of the best antidotes to being isolated with your own anger or your own
grief is finding a group that's working around a problem and finding a community
then I mean there's nothing like a community to lift your spirits even when
you're working on something that's difficult and dark and so I would
recommend certainly finding those groups align yourself aligning yourself with
them working with other people whatever the issue is there's there's a there are
people doing something about it you know we just don't hear about them very often
which is you know I'm glad you're going into you know journalism because that's
one of the things that's so missing from a lot of journalism is who are the
people and who are the organizations are actually trying to fix the problems you
know not just the titillating stuff about you know murders and and crises of
certain stories but who's actually working on it you know who are the
people we can trust you know we we live in a moment where governments aren't
governing properly they're not taking care of the future for people your age
or even younger they're not doing it who's doing that and there are lots of
great organizations and people who are doing that work so I know you started
with historical figures like Walt women as you said you have susan b anthony
frederick douglass and i know you said that people send you people that you
need to paint but welcome me through the process of how you pick the person and
start that painting well let me give you example of someone who came to me and
how it happened and then you know how I responded to it so I had a show of
there's a little Museum in Washington DC called the Sewell Belmont House which is
a museum for the women's rights movement and they asked me to put on a show there
of early proponents of women's rights and so I had Sojourner Truth and
Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Alice Paul people like that plus people like
Frederick Douglass who was a great advocate for women's rights while I was
there there was a when they invited me to come and give a talk and I did and
then a group of women from who were there at the talk came up to me
afterwards and said they were from Virginia and would I paint somebody from
a woman from Virginia and I said well sent me some names and a couple months
later I got this long list of names and on this list was a girl named Barbara
John's in 1951 Barbara John's was 16 years old and going to the Moton High
School in Farmville Virginia which is southern Virginia it was you know as the
time in all-black school separate but equal and she was getting angrier and
angrier she's smart she was ambitious and she knew she wasn't getting a good
education and it wasn't the fault of her teachers but they had 450 kids in a
school that was built for 200 they had no library they had some of the
classrooms were broken down school buses they had very little heat I mean it was
not a place to learn and she thought I'm gonna do something about this and with a
couple of other people she organized a plan which led to her getting you know
by subterfuge getting the principal out of the school calling the whole school
together giving a speech to the entire school that said we need a better school
I'm gonna walk out of this this is Barbara talking now I'm gonna walk out
of this school right now and go to the superintendent's office the white guy
and demand she wasn't looking interested in education this is 1950 I mean an
integration this is 1951 she was interested in just separate but really
equal and 450 kids walked out of that school
with her went to the superintendent's office who's threatened her and said you
know if you don't go back to school right now you'll all be suspended and
your parents will lose their jobs I mean that was a typical Civil Rights kind of
ploy which actually was often followed up on that people who spoke out lost
their jobs that's one of the reasons before an oven as much as the violence
that happened around people speaking up was losing your job she said basically
forget it we're going on strike you know we're in charge here not you and we're
gonna strike this school until you replace it with a really equal school
that case went to went into the courts it became one of the prime cases of
Brown versus Board of Education it started with a 16 year old girl it
didn't start with Thurgood Marshall you know and there's there's a whole lot
more history around this and and behind it of how it all worked out and why they
were looking for a case like that and everything else and and part of the
process of doing what I do has led me to you know Mel Leigh Barbara John's
portrait then but you know that the people who were had envisioned this this
whole process well before her but so then I got in touch with you know people
in Virginia I found some little graduation photographs and
black-and-white of her graduating from high school you know I made a much
bigger picture of it you know an in color and everything trying to imagine
what she looked like and then it was unveiled at Terry McAuliffe's house in
Virginia who is the head of the Democratic Party I mean it just it was
amazing process of awareness for me and then using it to bring awareness to
other people about where some of the changes in this country come from and
I've painted now a lot of young people because often it's it's the passion of
young people which has led to big changes you know the one doesn't we make
a fetish in this country about voting you know is that that's the highest of
our democratic ideals it isn't often the people who commit civil
disobedience the people who lead protests the people who are adamant
about causes who have no access to vote are the ones who actually drive this
country in division where you can actually can vote about something for
instance I mean women couldn't vote for the right to vote well how did we get
there then it's because people actually committed civil disobedience they broke
the law they went to jail they this whole process you know was gone through
and then we get to that point and it's what happens before all that that
interest me I mean that's the people I paint who drive that process to the
point where we then as a as a whole society can decide on something
so this Syracuse exhibit is the first time that all 238 paintings are on
display all together what kind of planning and considerations did you have
to make to do all this well it was the planning and consideration was more
Syracuse's than mine now I've been working here at Syracuse or about six
years teachers have been our professors have been bringing small groups of these
paintings here and enabling me to go into classrooms all across the
curriculum and it's particularly driven by a man named Jim Clark who's a
professor in the drama department who has been working with me all the Ramos
time and promoting this show and so it was it was his vision about a year ago
that brought this all together I had never dreamed of actually seen the
entire exhibit myself in one place I mean I thought it would be a nice idea
but I didn't think would happen and I'm just I wasn't prepared for the
cumulative effect of the show and and what it would look like well it's
amazing and I know you're gonna have here in Syracuse two of your subjects do
talk richard bowman and dr. mona hanna-attisha why did you want to talk
with them and how will that interaction add to this message you're trying to
deliver dr. mona hanna-attisha and Richard Bowen are basically two
whistleblowers I've painted a lot of whistleblowers and they were chosen by
the committee here who's putting together to talk as much as by me we
were looking for people we thought would be particularly interesting for students
to here you know dr. mona hanna-attisha is an iraqi-american pediatrician from
Flint Michigan who blew the whistle on the lead in the water there you know
this is a terrible crime it happened years ago now and still isn't fixed in
this country and I mean she's just an incredibly smart passionate person who
will not let this subject go until you know economic justice and environmental
justice is done for the people in Flint Richard Bowen is court of the other end
of the spectrum he was a risk assessment lawyer officer at Citigroup you know a
Citibank was the biggest bank in the world and in the lead up to the big
recession in 2008 he blew the whistle on all the felonies they were committing in
terms of fraud around mortgages and bundling mortgages into you know
securities and then reselling them you know he was trying to protect the bank
from its own corruption and then protect the world's this country's economy and
the world economy from the failure of the biggest bank in the world they fired
him for bringing the bad news and then the economy collapsed they didn't want
to listen to them you know and we've all paid a huge price for that but he's you
know like I find that you know in whether it's government or corporations
or you know any institutions they all have a code of ethics most people who go
into them think that they will generally follow those and they think it's a good
idea when then when actually they see that the codes of ethics are being
broken and they start to complain what they find out is that people in
positions of power often know that they're being broken but have no
intention of changing it and they get fired for trying to do the right thing
often those same people then become full time activists around a much bigger
picture and dr. Moniz like that and Richard Bowness like that and they are
spectacular examples for young people who are about to go out into the world
and get jobs often in these big institutions thinking that everybody
supports ethical behavior there only to find out that's not quite the case and
how important it is then to insist that the corruption be exposed I mean our our
society a democratic society can't persist can't be healthy if that kind of
corruption can go on if people can be treated that unequally if some people
can make billions of dollars off of corruption at the expense of a whole
society it's untenable and and we have a great debt oh for people like that now I
know lastly really quick you're not supposed to ask a parent who their
favorite child is but do you have a favorite portrait yeah it could be the
one I'm working on now but there are some that I talk about again and again
and again and let me just tell you do I have time tell a little story okay every
time I answer this question I pick a different portrait so it's not exactly
it's my favorite this moment because I'm thinking about it do you know who Woody
Guthrie was do you know have you ever sung this song this land is your land of
course you did and you probably know the first two or three verses Woody Guthrie
was a singer-songwriter coming out of Oklahoma in Texas in the 1930s during
the Dust Bowl and the depression he was a guy who wrote that song he wrote it
because he was very angry about the condition of poor people in this country
and how as the Dust Bowl progressed and the depression depressed it progressed
they were being crushed you know we had at that point thousands
of refugees in this country you know going to places like California looking
for work and living in refugee camps they weren't Syrians you know they
weren't Iraqis they weren't you know Somalis they were American farmers from
the Midwest living in refugee camps totally crushed by that moment he wrote
that song kind of in response to that and the way we sing that song I mean
first of all he was just a man of who used art in my estimation
the right way you know or any very powerful way to authenticate the lives
of people who'd been victimized by any situation and because often we don't
even name those people he no they named them he wrote songs about them to bring
attention to their plight and he did you know and that song though this land is
your land as we sing it we use it to celebrate how big and beautiful and you
know the Gulf Stream waters redwood forests etc it's yours it's mine isn't
that great that isn't what the songs about our
schools do not teach the last verses the last verse is what he was all the first
part is a set up to him saying one right sunny morning in the shadow of the
steeple by the relief office I saw my people as they stood hungry I stood
there wondering if this land was made for you and me that's what the song is
about that's what we don't teach that big question is it these huge income
disparities in this country how can it be yours and mine if we allow this to
continue so at this moment where we have again gotten to that point of these
enormous income disparities that completely counteract the idea of
democracy he's my favorite portrait well thank you so much for being here
congratulations on your many successes thank you thank you for talking great
questions so you've been watching an interview
with Robert Shetterly and I'm Taylor s for The NewsHouse
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