This is the tenth anniversary of the Word Festival in Blue Hill,  three days of events celebrating literature and the creative arts with readings, workshops, book signings, and discussion held at the end of October every year in various venues around town.

I was asked to hang four AWTT portraits in the Winings Gallery as part of the festival. They chose portraits of four diverse women with Maine connections—two of them writers, two more written about:

Frances Perkins, Secretary of Labor under F.D.R., 1933-1945

Margaret Chase Smith, U.S. Senator, 1949 – 1973

Heather Cox Richardson, active historian and journalist

Rivera Sun, novelist and social justice activist

I was asked to speak on October 22 in the gallery about these women. Thinking about it, I was at a loss to describe—except for the fact that they are American women and I had painted them—what connected them. And then I remembered the quote on the portrait of the great American playwright Arthur Miller:

“I think the job of the artist is to remind people of what they have chosen to forget.”

And it occurred to me that every portrait in AWTT is of a person we might call a social justice artist who is reminding us of some crucial part of the social covenant we have chosen to forget.

Frances Perkins, as Secretary of Labor, was responsible for formulating and advancing the legislation of the New Deal—workplace safety, minimum wage, social security, the end of child labor, the right to unionize. Her guiding concept was dignity. We had forgotten that we can’t have a successful democracy unless all people feel that the society affords the possibility of a dignified life to everyone. 

Margaret Chase Smith, while serving as the first and only woman in the U.S. Senate, delivered her Statement of Conscience in 1950 denouncing the McCarthy Hearings, their red baiting, black listing and career-ending political accusations. She reminded us of the function of democratic governance: not telling us what to think and how to act, but encouraging people to become their unique selves, to “. . . call their souls their own.”

Heather Cox Richardson reminds us that if we choose to forget our history, we don’t know who we are, and a people who don’t know who they are can justify nearly anything. Or, in Voltaire’s words, “People who can be made to believe absurdities will be made to commit atrocities.”  It is curious that as Richardson has documented the failure of our checks and balances and the decline of our democratic institutions, she has herself become a self-correcting institution, the memory that refuses to forget.

Rivera Sun tells thrilling stories for young people of the power and activism of young people. It seems that every generation needs to be reminded of the power of people to control their own destiny. We don’t need to be the helpless exploited prey of oligarchs and corrupt systems. Rivera reminds us we can organize—we must organize!—to create a just and sustainable future. Her stories and essays remind young people how powerful they can be.

Every act of courage on behalf of social justice is a reminder of what we have chosen to forget. We can and must protect what we love.