Alan Magee – A Testament to What is Best in Us

“Look for the helpers.”

—Fred Rogers

Robert Shetterly’s Americans Who Tell the Truth

Robert Shetterly’s Americans Who Tell the Truth is a singular masterpiece comprised of many parts—a synthesis of art, biography, American history, and civic engagement. It is a comprehensive syllabus in decency and courage—and a letter to posterity. Shetterly’s project, begun in 2002, takes on a heightened relevance now, when the fundamental virtues of our society are under assault. The institutions through which we endeavor to take care of each other are being maligned and dismantled, and the most vulnerable among us may soon lose the rudimentary protections that our government has until now provided for them. Longstanding agreements with democratic nations are broken, while dictators are praised and courted. A looming environmental catastrophe is to be ignored and exacerbated. To stare into this abyss can be debilitating; to look away from it will be to surrender. Robert Shetterly shows us where we can look if we choose to be both informed and resilient. The people he honors with his portraits are the helpers that, all those years ago, Mister Rogers told us to look for.

As public life coarsens around us, it will be important to remember that art can reinforce our capacities for empathy and kindness. We will need art not only as an amenity, but as a sustenance. The photographer Robert Adams opens his book Art Can Help with this sentence: “It is the responsibility of artists to pay attention to the world, pleasant or otherwise, and to help us live respectfully in it.” Art that might bolster and heal us can spring from the traumas that lie ahead. Experiencing bewilderment firsthand may be the prerequisite for our being able to offer guidance through art.

In the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War waged by the United States against Iraq, Naseer Shamma, a young Iraqi musician and a virtuoso of the oud, wrote and recorded a fifteen-minute composition titled “Al-Amiriya.” It was an answer to his anguish over the US bombing of the Amiriya civilian shelter in Baghdad where over 400 people were killed; 260 women and 52 children were among them. Shamma described the ruined shelter as “an image of the collapse of the world, the collapse of humanity.”

I did not know about Shamma’s “Al-Amiriya” until a few days ago, when a friend who had grown up in the Middle East introduced me to it. He cautioned me, saying that “it is difficult, and not a work that can be experienced while doing something else.” He placed a chair for me facing the speakers, then left me alone. “Al-Amiriya” is a spellbinding work of art, evoking the play of children and the terror of war—jubilant life followed by the sirens and screams of death. It is also astonishingly beautiful, a musical lamentation that engenders hope simply through the miracle of its existence. When it ended, I was left marveling at how this music could have been accomplished by one man with a single stringed instrument. It struck me that tragedy had forced it into being.

Eleven years after Shamma wrote and recorded “Al-Amiriya” the United States was preparing to attack Iraq once again. Robert Shetterly was, by his own account, angry and inconsolable over the imminent war and the squandered moment of international goodwill that had been extended to us following the World Trade Tower attacks. He later explained that, unable to contain his frustration and rage, he was beginning to annoy his friends with his railing against the needless suffering ahead. In answer to his despair, Shetterly sat down to paint a portrait of Walt Whitman. He needed Whitman’s company to mitigate his own distress and anger—”to make myself feel better,” as he once explained it. His choice, in retrospect, seems prophetic. It is as if he had set out, beginning with this portrait, to prepare a community for us in anticipation of our future need for it. Indeed, we need Robert Shetterly’s Americans Who Tell the Truth in 2025 as urgently as the artist needed Whitman in 2002.

If Shetterly had not made the decision to paint Walt Whitman in response to a war, there would be no portrait of Rachael Corrie, the twenty-three-year-old volunteer in Gaza who was killed by an Israeli bulldozer driver as she tried to defend a Palestinian home, or of the farm labor organizer Baldemar Velásquez, who advises us to “speak truth to power with love in your heart; pray for courage to speak it despite your fears.” If Shetterly had not felt the sting of injustice so keenly and personally, we would not know Rachael Corrie or Baldemar Velásquez, nor most of Shetterly’s more than 280 courageous Americans. Their lives and their examples would be buried under a daily torrent of news and opinion that offers very few lessons in courage. 

The portraits are works of art that do not leave us alone to contemplate them aesthetically. They seem to regard us as attentively as we regard them. With few exceptions, their eyes look into our eyes. We become conscious of their corporeal vulnerabilities while we admire their courageous words and actions. Shetterly’s heroes are people like ourselves who weigh the risks of speaking the truth, of defending the weak and defying the powerful.

Shetterly tells his story through the voices of others. The German essayist, philosopher, and cultural critic Walter Benjamin expressed the wish to create a work of literature comprised entirely of quotations. He never did this, but such a book would be as revelatory of the author’s mind as a book written in his own words. I like to think of Shetterly as having followed through, roughly a century later, on Benjamin’s plan—stepping aside and bringing the people he admires onto the stage.

As a fellow artist, I can’t allow my admiration for the paintings to go unmentioned. These portraits are masterfully painted, and convey a palpable accord between the subject and the artist. Each portrait is distinct and given the dignity of its independence from the others. There is nothing repetitive or formulaic about these works. This is a remarkable feat considering that all of the portraits are of the same size and general design. If these paintings had not been strikingly beautiful and compelling in themselves, Americans Who Tell the Truth would be missing the spark that brings Shetterly’s project to life. Certain portraits in particular held my attention. The painting of the musician and teacher John Alston is one of them; Alston’s off-center torso leans out of the panel while his attentive face tips back into it, as if we are in conversation with him. Another favorite is the women’s rights activist Tarana Burke, with her determined countenance enhanced by Shetterly’s harmony of pinks, blue-green, and brown. I stood a long time, admiring the portraits of Ady Barkan, Majora Carter, Daniel Ellsberg, James Douglas, and Alice Rothchild. I was pleased to see the faces of several acquaintances and friends among the portraits.

On rare occasions, art can set aside its affectations and speak in clear and accessible language. It can teach us something new and remind us of what we have already known and forgotten. Bertolt Brecht, who wanted to teach as well as entertain, insisted that his actors drop the fashionable expressionism of the day and speak their lines clearly so that audiences would understand them. Rob Shetterly’s truth tellers speak their lines clearly.

When I walked into the vast atrium of the Bates Mill in Lewiston, on the next to last day of Shetterly’s inclusive exhibition, I witnessed a level of engagement and visceral excitement that I had never before seen in viewers of an art exhibition. During that morning, three high-school classes were touring the show. The students were animated—taking notes on the portraits and quotations, talking with exuberance to each other while standing before a portrait of a feminist leader or a sports hero. “It is always like this when a class arrives,” one of the docents told me. 

The gift that Shetterly has given to us and to these students is immeasurable. A lot will be asked of all of us as the pitch of environmental and social crises intensifies. And, for the generations that follow, Americans Who Tell the Truth will stand as a testament to what is best in us. It will continue to inspire through its timeless message, and through the miracle of its existence.