Robert Shetterly
Robert Shetterly (1946–) is a visual artist, social activist, and writer. For the past twenty years, he has painted portraits of citizens who address issues of social, environmental, and economic fairness in the series Americans Who Tell The Truth, now the subject of Kane Lewis’s documentary Truth Tellers.
The project is recorded in a multi-volume book series, the first of which is Portraits of Racial Justice: Americans Who Tell The Truth (New Village Press, 2021), followed by Portraits of Earth Justice: Americans Who Tell The Truth (New Village Press, 2022), and Portraits of Peacemakers: Americans Who Tell The Truth (New Village Press, 2024). Shetterly has illustrated for The Maine Times newspaper, the National Audubon’s children’s newspaper Audubon Adventures, and 30 children’s titles. As an independent artist, he has contributed to various collections of drawings and etchings across the U.S. and Europe, most notably, a collection of drawings titled Speaking Fire at Stones and a series of 70 etchings based on William Blake’s “Proverbs of Hell.”
Since 1990, Shetterly has been a producer of the Maine Masters Project, a video documentary project highlighting Maine artists, and has served as President of the Union of Maine Visual Artists (UMVA). Shetterly lives and works in Brooksville, Maine.