This Artist Has Trump Down to an Art
“Lady Liberty stood me up!” the artist Isabelle Brourman announced, faux-pouting, on a recent Thursday evening at the Will Shott Gallery on New York’s Lower East Side. It was the opening of Exhibit 1: Paper Trail, a collection of work Brourman had created alongside courtroom sketch artists during Donald Trump’s various New York court battles last year. Brourman, who has a knack for intuiting the power of theatrics in and out of the courtroom, had spent the previous day hunting down Times Square’s Lady Liberty character and — having located her atop her silver stilts at the corner of 46th Street and Broadway — had hired her to come to the show. Then, at the last moment, Lady Liberty had bailed via text, a metaphor for our times if there ever were one. “It’s the most bullshit thing ever,” Brourman said of Liberty’s absence. She laughed and waved her long fingers. “It’s a narrative gift.”
In fact, Brourman’s courtroom art came about as a way of trying to make sense of a narrative. Trained as a fine artist, she was sketching in her studio in Brooklyn and watching the livestream of the Depp v. Heard trial when there was a mention of the fans who were in attendance. “I was like, ‘Oh, shit, the justice process is open to the public,’” she tells me, explaining how she jumped in her car and headed to Virginia, lining up at 3:30 a.m. to get a coveted seat for the proceedings. Sitting in on the trial turned out to be something of a mindfuck. For one, Brourman had recently filed a sexual assault lawsuit against a professor at the University of Michigan. For another, she wasn’t prepared for the unmitigated adrenaline of being in court, how it all felt so much more alive than anything she’d imagined, despite its inherent pageantry and pomp. Drawing was the best way she knew to process it, applying her layered, frenetic, “Tasmanian-devil glamour” style — “there’s always a balance of traditional painting and experimentation, grunge and grace,” she puts it — to the intricate machinery of the judicial system. “The work knows more about the trial than I do, for sure. I couldn’t figure anything out when I was in [court], but with the drawings, there was something more I could figure out by looking at them.”
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On the drive home from hearing the verdict in the Depp trial (Depp was awarded $15 million in damages; Heard was awarded $2 million), Brourman got word that Roe V. Wade had been overturned, so she rerouted to the steps of the Supreme Court so that she could sketch the protests happening there. Then she headed to Los Angeles to draw the sentencing in the rape trial of Danny Masterson, who starred on That ’70s Show. When Trump’s civil case on financial fraud ramped up in New York City — and through methods that are highly creative (and highly off-the-record) — Brourman finagled a seat with the other courtroom sketch artists, who were not entirely welcoming to this stilettoed upstart in their midst. “I felt like I was trespassing the tradition,” she says, though she explains how she also took pains to respect it, to learn the trade rules and customs and to keep them. “I always had a vision about handling myself in a way in which I could further the experiment,” she says. “So I basically adopted the principles of decorum. I never broke the rules — except for my JUUL, but I never got caught.”
Brourman attended every single day of Trump’s civil-fraud and criminal hush-money trials, as well as the day of the E. Jean Carroll trial when the ex-president took the stand. Soon, word was getting around that one of the artists was doing something interesting, and lawyers and witnesses were stopping by Brourman’s seat to survey how they were being depicted. Allen Weisselberg pleaded for more hair (“It was impossible; his head is bald except for hairs around his ear”). Trump Organization comptroller Jeff McConney, she said, recoiled from the image of himself weeping on the stand. Even Trump himself lingered approvingly over his likeness before commenting, “Gotta lose some weight.” Halfway through the hush-money trial, Brourman ran into Trump campaign co-chair Susie Wiles outside Trump Tower. “I went up to her and said, ‘I drew you today.’ She said, ‘That’s interesting.’ I pulled out a sketch I’d made of her [and said], ‘Well, I’m not doing a traditional thing, just so you know.’” Wiles approved. “She gave me her card and said, ‘We like different at Trump.’”
For her part, Brourman leaned into the performative nature of it all. At some point, she began showing up in court dressed in outfits selected for her by fashion designer Mia Vesper or on loan from Desert Stars Vintage’s couture showroom. “There’s also an element of theater,” she says of the judicial process. “And so it was just kind of instinct for me to build an entire world that I was almost casting myself into.” When Michael Cohen testified, she wore the same dress Ivanka had worn on her first flight on Air Force One. When covering the Republican Convention, she wore a pink and orange silk taffeta suit and red alligator pumps. When she went down to Mar-a-Lago to paint a portrait of Trump, she chose Vivienne Westwood. “A black velvet skirt suit, and I had a spray tan,” she tells me. “My dad was like, ‘Don’t wear anything too funky.’ I was like, ‘OK, you’re right.’ I knew that that setting was a different courtroom. It was more of a royal court than it was a court of law.”
Trump sat for the portrait over the course of two days, taking meetings with people like Matt Gaetz and Stephen Miller while Brourman stood over her easel. When she asked about the assassination attempt he’d survived only a few weeks before, and he showed her where the bullet had grazed him, she added that slash to the portrait, which she named after the Bob Dylan song, “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding).” The day before the gallery opening, the large canvas leaned against the wall of her studio, facing inward. “My dreams were getting weird,” she tells me. “I was like, ‘I gotta turn it.’”
Brourman has been accused of villainizing Trump and of glorifying him, but if her art has been embraced by both sides of the aisle, it’s because it plops the viewer into the messines of a moment without giving them clear directives about how that moment should make them feel. Trials, Brourman points out, are about each side creating a compelling but competing narrative; she’s interested in the pull and push, in capturing the energy in that tension. “In these high-profile trials, the adrenaline is insane. Electric,” she says. “With the work, I can kind of get the feeling of the moment and let people interpret something.” How they interpret it is up to them. “I’m comfortable in not being sure of what the answer is,” Brourman says. “Right now, it kind of feels like everybody always has to have a stance immediately, and so creating works that are more layered and are building a record and have a mood to them, it’s opening up the possibility of acknowledging that you might have complicated feelings about something.”
The night of the opening, Brourman showed up fashionably late and channeling the Statue of Liberty herself in a teal sheared beaver-fur coat and Saint Laurent snakeskin platform boots and with her blond hair teased up like a crown in back (“It’s Sharon Stone in Casino,” she said, laughing). The tiny gallery was crammed to the brim, art scenesters in corsets and silk-screened shirts rubbing shoulders with journalists in statement glasses and lawyers sporting tweed. Near the door, MSNBC anchor Lawrence O’Donnell took in a Ralph Steadman-esque depiction of Stormy Daniels. Lawyers Andrew Amer and Colleen Faherty, who helped New York Attorney General Letitia James prosecute the case, searched another work for their own images. James herself was pictured, ankles crossed and hands folded, in a smaller piece toward the back. “I told her that she should get that one,” said Brourman. “Like, she has first right of refusal.”
Brourman surveyed the room, holding her own sort of court. “The gang’s all here!” she announced happily, though it wasn’t quite true: As luck would have it, the judge in the hush-money trial had announced that the sentencing for Trump’s 34 felony convictions would happen the next morning, so the president-elect’s team was conspicuously absent, presumably still working on getting a stay. Toward the end of the opening, Brourman got a text from O’Donnell: “Sentencing is gonna happen!! Announce to the crowd. Supreme Court just ruled against Trump.” The gallery buzzed.
“The work is really alive, in part to my process, but also because it’s a collaboration with an event that keeps unfolding,” Brourman explained. “And so, you know, what could happen tomorrow could change what something I already made means.”
En route to the show’s afterparty, she gathered the teal fur around her shoulders and said her goodbyes. “I’ll see you in the morning!” she called out to those who still lingered. “See you in court!”
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