Americans Who Tell the Truth Portraits at Tremont School

The Middle School at the Tremont School in Lexington, Massachusetts recently concluded its Social Movements Unit and is bidding farewell to two special presences, portraits of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, painted by Robert Shetterly of Blue Hill, Maine.

Shetterly regularly sends out original portraits that are part of his series Americans Who Tell the Truth. The full-sized portraits hung in the Tremont Middle School classrooms for six weeks while students studied the social movements, utopian communities, and reformers of nineteenth-century America. The portraits, which included quotes from the depicted leaders, offered touchstones for discussions of the role of art, words, and action in making social change. Many students included paintings as part of their individual projects, and one student chose to study a painter, Winslow Homer, who changed views of society through his realistic portraits of ordinary people in the late 1800s.

For more on the Americans Who Tell the Truth series, visit americanswhotellthetruth.org. For more on Tremont School’s Living Curriculum, visit tremontschool.org.