AWTT artist Robert Shetterly delivered this address to an in-house and online audience at the Center for Global Humanities, University of New England, on the evening of January 28, 2026.

Some video highlights:

Shetterly’s reflections on L. Frank Baum’s original story The Wonderful Wizard of Oz—focusing on Dorothy’s act of “radical compassion” (saving her dog), which led to her hero’s journey and vision quest. In many of his portrait subjects, Shetterly finds similar life-changing moments when their “radical compassion” was fueled.

Story of fifteen-year-old Claudette Colvin and her recollection of refusing to give up her seat on the bus, how “History tied me to my seat . . . what would Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth do?” Shetterly finds inspiration to keep painting truth tellers so that he can surround himself—and others—with courageous people who show us the way toward moral action.

Helen Keller not only showed the world what a person with multiple disabilities could accomplish; she also taught us that “rights are things we get when we are strong enough to make good our claim on them.”

The stories of the pioneering gay rights activist Henry Hay and Mary Bonauto—born decades apart. Sixty-five years after Hay began the Mattachine Society in 1950, Bonauto argued the successful same-sex marriage case in the U.S. Supreme Court.

Shetterly’s talk also included the inspiring stories of Frederick Douglass, Derrick Jensen, Walt Whitman, Rachel Carson, Muhammad Ali, Martin Luther King, Jr. (and James Douglass‘s book about King’s assassination), Frances Perkins, Dr. Mona Hanna, Henry David Thoreau, and his most recent portrait subject, Heather Cox Richardson.