Thomas Jefferson: One Man, Two Legacies

Questions raised by the display of AWTT portraits at Monticello.

The Coronavirus and Why We Have Government

How our government has failed us during the coronavirus epidemic – and a call to action.

George W’s Innocence Project

I’ve got a stone in my shoe. It’s been there for 18 painful years. I can’t seem to accommodate myself to it. Because every so often it grows another sharp edge. Those familiar with the Americans Who Tell the Truth portrait project know that the stone planted itself in my shoe shortly after 9/11 when […]

To Stand Up a Stone

Artist Robert Shetterly contemplates how acts of courage are like standing up stones.

Who Will Save Us from the Climate Crisis?

From Robert Shetterly’s opening address at the Climate Convergence Conference in Blue Hill, Maine on July 20, 2019. I begin with Gauguin’s great painting which asks the questions: Where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we going? Dinosaurs lived 200 million years on this planet, and my guess is that they never […]

Death of a Warbler

I was sitting at the kitchen table reading Elizabeth Kolbert’s article in The New Yorker (May 20, 2019) about species extinction. Such a litany of loss overfills the reservoir of one’s grief while its calm, ordered prose provides a dam to hold it back. Suddenly there was a soft thud on the window behind me. […]

On Getting Arrested at Bath Iron Works

A couple of weeks ago I chose to get arrested at a demonstration at Bath Iron Works (BIW) in Bath, Maine. The day was cold, windy, and wet. A huge new battleship, the USS Lyndon Baines Johnson, was being launched. BIW is one of two shipyards in the U.S. capable of building these mammoth, deadly […]

How to Think about Frederick Douglass’s Feet of Clay

Not saints, flawed human beings. I’ve told people ever since I began painting the Americans Who Tell the Truth portraits: I don’t paint saints. They’re all real people. No heroes on pedestals. Just like us. Not religious saints, not secular saints. A few icons, maybe, but all real people. That means any one of us […]

Fairness. A Sparrow. A Robin.

I was driving home from the Conners Emerson School in Bar Harbor where I had spent the day with three first grade and one fourth grade class. For reasons I’m not sure of, I began thinking of this Bible verse: “Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall […]

Every Cog and Wheel

“To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.”   – Aldo Leopold On reading Jill Lepore’s masterful new history of the United States, These Truths, one cannot overstate the importance of telling a country’s story honestly. For how else – but for all the triumphs, the failures, the ideals, the hypocrisies, […]