Before arriving at Art Basel Miami Beach in early December with two headline-making paintings in two prominent shows, Isabelle Brourman had been traveling the country for years, plying her trade as a courtroom sketch artist. In watercolors, acrylic paint, colored pencils, graphite and ink, she documented the nation’s most significant court cases and the polarizing figures associated with them.
A journey to the Everglades to visit the national preserve around Alligator Alcatraz; months spent day in and day out at New York’s 26 Federal Plaza immigration court; the front lines at Chicago’s Broadview; Luigi Mangione’s pretrial hearing; the legal circus of Depp vs. Heard; Trump’s hush money case; Mar-a-Lago after the Butler, Pa., assassination attempt; and the Fourth of July in Malibu with her former New York magazine colleague, political journalist Olivia Nuzzi — Brourman was there for all of it.
“I’ve been bopping around, mismanaging my time,” she says with a laugh when The Hollywood Reporter caught up with her at the Miami Beach Convention Center during Art Basel.
Standing before her painting of Nuzzi, titled How to Disappear — part of Jeffrey Deitch’s The Great American Nude presentation at the fair, anchored by the seminal 1961 Tom Wesselmann work of the same name — Brourman appears as a gonzo Alice in Wonderland, wearing her signature headband and contemplating a descent down the rabbit hole into the bumpy psychological terrain of what she calls the “American landscape.”
This chapter of her whirlwind career began in 2022, when Brourman showed up at the Depp vs. Heard trial. The Pittsburgh native, who received an MFA from Pratt, had watched the case’s fervor unfold on YouTube and made art while following it online. “I was involved in a lawsuit for sexual assault at a university that I went to. I thought I had this POV, and there was something in me that I hadn’t ever felt before. It was like, ‘I know I want to be there.’ I got in my car and I went down there. When I stood in this line, there was another level of fandom and devotion for Johnny Depp. I wasn’t making fan art, so I didn’t want to be in the [courtroom] gallery. The fans were asking me — watching over me — [trying to see] whose side I was on. In that moment, I saw Bill Hennessy, the sketch artist, in his own spot [in the courtroom]. [I thought] I have to be official and this is the answer, I’ll become a sketch artist.”
Assignments for Hyperallergic and later New York magazine came with access, and she transitioned to an even higher-profile case and defendant, Donald J. Trump. His criminal trial and subsequent election as president in 2024 would serve as the foundation for her series The Aftermath, which explores the consequences of his second term. These paintings include portraits of Trump, The Military Ball (The First 100 Days), The Ballad of Luigi Mangione (pretrial portrait), How to Disappear (Olivia in self-imposed exile) and No Rest for the Wicked.
Brourman views this work — and her broader oeuvre — as a power map of America. The throughline: “They’re all intriguing characters, and they all have stories and they all have a connection to the landscape. They act as points on a map and become a composite of a country and personal memory,” she says.
How to Disappear, shown for the first time at the fair, hangs among works by such blue-chip artists as Kehinde Wiley, Mickalene Thomas, Francis Picabia and Hajime Sorayama. It is here that Brourman takes a seat among the art world elite, far from the in-the-moment drawings for which she is known in American courtrooms.
No Rest for the Wicked, the latest portrait to be created for The Aftermath series, is a response to Brourman’s visit to the sacred land around Alligator Alcatraz and a larger synthesis of her time spent documenting the mass-immigration machine in New York and Chicago. It is part of The Body Is the Body exhibition at the Rice Hotel, a gallery and studio housed in a historic 1914 structure in downtown Miami, curated by Los Angeles-based Simon Brewer (he’s the associate director of Deitch L.A.) and Nathalie Martin. The exhibition is on view by appointment through Jan. 4 and features work by L.A. artists Paul McCarthy and Jordan Wolfson.
Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, Brourman shares in her own words the backstory behind five of the most compelling portraits in her Aftermath series, including an exclusive reveal of The Military Ball (The First 100 Days).
Beyond The Aftermath, Brourman is filming a documentary series called Starring America about the “American deportation machine” with creative partner Jenny Berlin. Together, they travel to document “historic tumult and suffering in Chicago, New York and South Florida.” Each place-specific episode weaves two parallel forms of documentation: on-the-ground reporting and interviews and Brourman’s process of artistic witness “fuse rigorous journalism with the reflective power of art,” Berlin says.
How to Disappear and No Rest for the Wicked are available, respectively, from Deitch, and Simon and Nathalie.
How to Disappear
Brourman and Nuzzi first met in the courtroom during Trump’s criminal trial, but they had been colleagues for a while. “My drawings went along with her writing for New York magazine.”
They partnered on coverage that took the reporting-sketching duo to Mar-a-Lago (It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding). Weeks later, it was revealed that Nuzzi was having a personal relationship with then-political candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., which led to her dismissal from New York.
In 2025, Brourman landed in Malibu on the Fourth of July to create How to Disappear, with Nuzzi as her subject.
“I had been thinking about painting Olivia for some time. The portrait came about while she was in this self-imposed exile in what she calls ‘the wrong side of the country.’ We had spoken about doing something, and I was instantly on board because she was someone I had wanted to paint within this larger series, ‘The Aftermath.’ The series is about being suspended in time and in a country having an identity moment.
I wanted to lay everything down with great caution and care. The only thing that I knew was that Olivia was going to be nude. Everything else was something that I decided as I went. I started with her form and enveloped her in several rings of symbolism. Here we have two sirens … she had told me about them … and she references in [her book American Canto] this painting that RFK had in his house of Ulysses.
There’s Icarus in her hip. [In her chest, there’s] leaking metal, a smoke alarm. It’s some sort of punctured armor. Her eyes are closed as she is very much investigating something inward. This person has become a vessel for the American imagination, as well as the American woe. It’s as much about Olivia as it is about the American psyche. I’m doing psychological portraiture. It’s a perfect, beautiful body, but there’s something warped.”
How to Disappear was later finished in Brourman’s New York studio.
The painting’s debut, as well as the launch of Nuzzi’s book American Canto, sparked continued allegations from Ryan Lizza, Nuzzi’s ex-fiancé, who claimed that the political journalist used her Trump assignments to gather “opposition research,” which she was feeding to Kennedy during his presidential campaign. He also alleged that Brourman had a tape recorder in her bag during these sessions.
When asked to respond to the Lizza remarks, Brourman declines: “No, thank you. I’m so not interested in the tabloid stuff. I’m an artist. I’m an observer.”
It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)
Painted at Mar-a-Lago, It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding) is a seated portrait of Donald Trump, a prologue to The Aftermath series. During the election, Brourman pitched a story to Trump’s communications team with Nuzzi and New York magazine. Trump knew the artist’s work from court and agreed. “He just didn’t want it to be ‘screwy.’ I assured the team that I would be doing a painting. I showed up with a full easel, canvas and royal-court artist set, essentially, kind of camp royal court artist.”
With Trump, Brourman found herself in a “mind-boggling middle space.” She had been in court with him; he had been charged, convicted, shot in the ear and was running for president. “The question really was what is that figure looking at and what is coming next? And I think that loomed in the work, and I left part of it blank because I’m really interested in this state of unfinishedness.”
Trump’s eyes are painted black, almost masklike. Brourman asked to study his ear, which he allowed. She observed the breakage and the bullet’s trajectory. “It was really surreal, like a Wes Anderson movie.”
Stephen Miller and Matt Gaetz stood behind her as Trump introduced her as “‘one of the country’s top artists.’”
“He’s an interesting figure to draw, because he has so much going on. He’s a landscape, and that’s how I started thinking about figurative work as landscape painting,” she says.
No Rest for the Wicked
In the portrait of Trump at Mar-a-Lago It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding) made in the heat of the election, there is a question of “what is Trump looking at, what are we all looking at?” Brourman says. She left the bottom space blank to indicate uncertainty; the gaze is looking ahead, he is smiling, and his hands are forming a plan. “And No Rest for the Wicked is the portrait of America that we are seeing play out,” she says. “The immigration machine.”
When I was in the Everglades [near Alligator Alcatraz], I spoke to so many people who were affected by this new intervention and by man’s historical intervention in the land and their communities. In the blink of an eye, public land was ceded to the federal government through a loophole. The alligator is a symbol that is being misappropriated as a predator, but it’s known as a sacred guardian in the Everglades. It’s a vital part of the ecosystem. When we started researching the Miccosukee, who initially sued Alligator Alcatraz, I started building out the face. I was like, ‘Oh my God, it looks like him.’
Trump is the subject I’ve been the most liberated by. It’s a weird thing to say, but he’s taken so many liberties that there are no barriers to entry when I start to work. He’s such an overlord. He’s always going to be there.”
The Military Ball (The First 100 Days)
“I’ve never shown this work — it’s about the first 100 days, and it starts at the inaugural ball. It was a wild adventure because I had a 40-by-40 canvas on the press risers with the likes of Fox News.
When I got to the inaugural ball, which was after Trump’s confirmation hearing, I was standing right above the Fox News set and Hannity. Hegseth stepped up because Fox News gets all of them. And I’m painting him closer than I painted anyone else. That painting is a lot more smudged. It reflects on this weird purgatory. All of these military people that are so young, so red in the cheeks, and they’re having so much fun, they’re also prepared to go to battle if they have to. It was a crazy energy in there.
[Trump] had actually come from pardoning the January 6 people — that was the news that broke to me while I was painting, and I wrote it across the canvas, ‘he pardoned them all.’ Jenny, my creative partner, was filming, and I’m in my great-grandmother’s ball gown with chicken feathers and black velvet gloves, and then black rubber gloves on top for the paint. I looked at her, I couldn’t believe it. That was the first order of business. And then here we were at the military ball.”
Church and State
“When Trump was a defendant, there was this chaos. When he became president, it seemed like chaos entered the system. From painting the most famous person in the world, truly infamous, then turning into this space in the heart of New York, which is the story of the immigrant within this bureaucratic building. Undocumented people are trying to follow the law, trying to do it the right way, and then there are masked federal agents. Everyone is anonymous, and there’s no time.
It was one of the most surreal shocks to my system, coming from an observational place and as a citizen and a witness. Watching somebody be told they were going to see the judge and to bring their paper to the office, then asking about the masked individuals outside, and the judge saying if there’s anybody outside my door, they don’t answer to me. Watching that person leave. Then, there’s another court in the hall, and they’re detained and no one knows anything at this point. It’s the complete opposite of power. What goes through my mind is no longer even mental. It’s physical. The campaign Trump ran on is being realized now, and I feel a responsibility to pay attention — not just to him in the defendant’s chair, but to the system unfolding around him.”
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