Sketch Artist Isabelle Brourman’s Work Is an Ongoing Portrait of the President

The family—man, woman, baby—arrived on the 12th floor of the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building on a warm day in August. The 41-story edifice of bureaucracy, better known as 26 Federal Plaza, is one in a herd of government buildings sprawled across an eerily unpopulated quadrant of Manhattan, a few blocks from the Brooklyn Bridge and a straight shot up the center of the city from where gold leaf glints on the Statue of Liberty’s torch.

When the family entered the waiting area, Isabelle Brourman, the only sketch artist permitted in the court, was sitting inside the adjoining courtroom that would host the immigration hearing for which they’d come. “It’s kind of like the last bastion of the American dream,” she says of the process by which undocumented immigrants seek asylum and naturalization. But these hearings, a preliminary step in that long road, became a gamble of the highest stakes when the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency responded to President Donald Trump’s “Protecting the American People Against Invasion” executive order by deploying agents to immigration court hearings and executing unprecedented detainments regardless of the fact that hearings often adjourn with judges telling respondents to return for another hearing in a year or so. Brourman sketched at 26 Federal Plaza for the first time in June and, when we spoke in September, had been there nearly every day for more than two months, arriving at 8:30 a.m. and leaving in the afternoon.

Sketch artists have long served as an intermediary between court proceedings and public interest in them. In the 19th century, Theodore R. Davis sketched a moody scene at Andrew Johnson’s Senate impeachment hearing; in the 20th, the combat artist Howard Brodie captured Sirhan Sirhan and Charles Manson on the stand. In an era of 54-megapixel smartphone cameras and streaming Court TV, the sketches might seem like a gratuitous holdover from a bygone era, and yet Brourman’s work offers something unique. “I’m not taking a picture,” she says. “There’s a level of personal memory and shock that’s infused into the work.” And while she’s sketched and painted such high-profile proceedings as the Johnny Depp and Amber Heard defamation trial and Trump’s criminal indictment, she told me that her work has “never had utility like it does right now.” While photographers and journalists can report from the hallways and outside the building, the waiting rooms and hearings, like those of most federal cases, are typically off-limits to them. (None of them, including Brourman, is allowed in the stairwells or on the building’s 10th floor, which ICE uses as a holding facility for detained immigrants.)

Her work ranges from quick linedrawings to intricate Boschian scenes that incorporate depictions of the respondents and their families (“how strong they are, and how together they are in a way that I’ve never seen in my life”), judges flanked by flags, protesters outside the building, masked and vest-clad ICE agents holding printed-out lists of names that they roll up and idly tap against their legs. “There’s a lot of excessive intimidation,” she says, “a lot of lulls” in which the hallways are so quiet, you can hear the agents clinking their handcuffs “like a song.” (When agents have asked to see the work, “they see it as cool because that’s what they’re going for.”) Brourman includes text too, taking down her own impressions as well as snippets of overheard quotes: “ICE afuera,” or ICE outside. “Are you afraid to return to your country?” Respondents, she says, sometimes arrive with lists of their own, bearing the names of family members who have been killed in their country of origin.

“Portraiture isn’t always valorous, scenes aren’t always valorous,” Brourman says. “It’s about following your own vision, which is the only way to slip through a broad-stroke, occupational, big-force thing.”

Brourman departs from her contemporaries not only in style, but in her downtown-art-scene sensibility. She met her gallerist, Will Shott, at a Drunk Versus Stoned soccer game hosted in Montauk by the Tribeca dealer Max Levai and received her master’s from Pratt, where she was working on what she describes as “a lot of personal excavation stuff” that occupied a space between fantasy and diary. “I was coming out of a really long-term abusive situation, and I was using painting and mixed-media collage to find ways to retool traditional painting practice.” In 2022 Brourman was the first-named plaintiff among eight former students in a lawsuit against the University of Michigan and her undergraduate professor there, Bruce Conforth, who multiple former students alleged sexually assaulted and harassed them. The suit was filed outside Michigan’s statute of limitations and was dismissed, but it was amid the proceedings that she began watching coverage of Depp v. Heard. Feeling guilty for her voyeurism and in an effort to make something of her interest, she decamped to Fairfax County, Virginia, to paint the trial in real time. “I’ve always been a fan of gonzo journalism,” she says. About a year later, she brought her pencils and watercolors into Trump’s Manhattan criminal indictment, making a performance of her attendance in ’80s-esque outfits selected by the designer Mia Vesper, whose Lower East Side brick and mortar closed last year. Following the ear graze of an assassination attempt, she pitched herself to paint Trump at Mar-a-Lago, and he said yes. She’s still angling to do his presidential portrait—because, she says, all of her work is, essentially, an ongoing portrait of the president. “I got a lot of shit for drawing Trump, and I still get a lot of shit about what side I’m on, but I’m like, this is a big project and I don’t know where it’s going,” Brourman says. “Portraiture isn’t always valorous, scenes aren’t always valorous.” She notes Francisco Goya, who in his capacity as first court painter made what are now recognized as critical and satirical portraits of Spain’s monarchs and nobility. “It’s about following your own vision, which is the only way to slip through a broad-stroke, occupational, big-force thing.”

Today, her courtroom uniform consists of pants and vintage blazers with padded shoulders that she pairs with Isabel Marant sneakers or Salomon x Comme des Garçons shoes she scored on sale, both of which have hefty platforms: “I’m trying to get a view.” To entertain the kids in the building, with whom she also shares paper and pencils so they can draw, she gets her hands decked out each week by the nail artist Mei Kawajiri, whose elaborate three-dimensional creations have adorned the fingers of Bad Bunny, Cardi B, and models on the Balenciaga catwalk and in a Marc Jacobs campaign. When we speak, Brourman’s sporting a woman emerging from a field of flowers, stars and glitter, and alligator eyeballs that mesmerize the boys. She’s asked for one recurring motif: droplets that ripple over the acrylic like ice melting and tiny transparent cubes set on top of orange flames. “That’s my little personal protest.”

Inside 26 Federal Plaza on that day in August, Brourman chronicled what unfolded for the family of three. The father, whose name Brourman later learned to be Jamal Fadel, entered the courtroom and sat in front of Brourman. They both watched as, in the otherwise-empty waiting room, the ICE agent sat down across from the woman, who began rocking her baby. “And then another agent came and sat right next to her,” Brourman says.

The day dragged on. When Brourman passed through the waiting room following a bathroom break, the woman had begun to cry, a steady stream of tears that stained her shirt. Six more agents had joined her. “They’re big guys. They’re armed. They have belts, they have masks, they have vests,” Brourman says. The contrast of the respondents, scared and frantic, with the geometry and repetition of the agents was “like a Jacob Lawrence painting.” The tension rose. The judge adjourned the man’s hearing and he exited the courtroom. “You’re coming with us,” one of the agents told him. He handed his documents to his partner, reached into the stroller to pick up his child. “And at that point, all of the agents jumped up and surrounded the stroller with the baby in it and wouldn’t let go of the stroller. And then there was yelling, and the clerk closed the courtroom door, the waiting room doors closed. We were all stuck,” Brourman says. “I have never done this because I know that I could sacrifice my spot, but I started screaming, ‘Let the mother and the baby out.’ ” Amid the scrum, the father began to shout that this was America, that America was supposed to be free. An agent handcuffed him, escorted him into the hallway, through the gauntlet of press, to the stairwell. “I stayed in the waiting room; a security guard came and closed the door,” Brourman says. “And the mother was just crying and holding the baby. And I drew that.”