At 10 PM on April 10, 2022 in Fairfax County, Virginia a line of dozens of women and a handful of men snaked down the red brick side of the Circuit Court building. The row was a mass of blankets, bodies curled up into folding chairs, and limbs protruding from sleeping bags laid out on the cold concrete. There was palpable anticipation in the air, a sense that even as the queuers caught a few hours of sleep, they had not lost sight of their goal: to be one of the 100 people the next morning to secure a spectator wristband granting them a seat in the courtroom gallery where the subject of their affection, Johnny Depp, was suing his ex-wife Amber Heard for defamation of character. Those fans who were unsuccessful in clinching a coveted wristband settled into a large throng in front of the courthouse, waiting for the moment at the end of each day when Depp would wave at them from the window of his black Escalade. Some days Depp even had breakfast delivered to the loyal fans waiting outside and every morning, as court was called to order, he would stand, turn, and blow a kiss to the fans in the back, patting a fist to his heart in a gesture of solidarity. There was an ominous lack of fans for Amber Heard, only two or three held signs that read “we stand with Amber,” their lackluster presence overshadowed by enthusiastic Depp fans wearing pirate costumes, mermaid tails, and even a brown puffy apparatus meant to be “Amber Turd.”
This was the outrageous scene that 28 year old artist Isabelle Brourman walked into when she came down from Brooklyn to Fairfax County to see what all the fuss was about, intent on drawing it. Though she had never worked as a court artist before, through a series of happy accidents and loopholes (including the primary court artist being called away mid-trial) Brourman became the official illustrator of Depp v. Heard. She was given a special access pass and her own row in the front of the gallery from which she had an unobstructed view of the entire courtroom. By the end of the 6 week trial Brourman was a bonafide court artist, having produced over 100 drawings of the proceedings, all of which are on view in Virginia is for Lovers.
Interestingly, Brourman’s illustrations were never circulated as part of the veritable tsunami of Depp v. Heard content that inundated the internet during and directly after the trial. Considering that courtroom illustration has ahistory of being implemented as a substitute for photography, especially in cases where there is a moratorium on filming inside the courtroom, when a trial is televised, drawings are considered superfluous and secondary. The decision to televise a trial is the judge’s. In Depp v. Heard, Judge Penny Azcarate denied Heard’s plea to prohibit cameras, a decision that Depp’s team welcomed. Azcarate allowed only one news channel: Law & Crime Network’s Court TV and one photographer from Reuters to record the proceedings. In an effort to mitigate a media circus situation, she also made the unconventional decision not to give out press passes, which resulted in members of the media having to compete with die-hard fans for spectator passes. Consequently, outlets like the New York Times, The Atlantic and The Wall Street Journal were forced to rely solely on the content produced by Court TV and the photographs circulated by Reuters. The result was the illusion of a diverse discourse across media platforms such as YouTube, Tiki Tok, Instagram, Twitter and major news sites that in reality stemmed from only one primary source: Court TV.
The sheer abundance of online engagement with Depp v. Heard loomed over the trial; it reigned as the most interacted with topic on social media, far surpassing all other significant headlines such as the war in Ukraine and the leaked Supreme Court draft opinion detailing the eventual overturning of Roe v. Wade. Court TV’s viewership increased 50 fold. The single-source consumption and regurgitation of Court TV’s coverage, a channel which specializes in creating viewership rooted in the justice process, produced the perfect environment for “the proceedings to be deliberately, even gleefully tailored to a viewer’s whim.”1 Social media’s instant feedback on the trial provided litigators with trending lines of thought which could help shape legal strategy. The physics rule called “The Observer Effect: observing a system necessarily affects it,” can be taken further to state, “observing a system necessarily affects it AND the observer.” Transparency and integrity in journalism is all but impossible to accomplish in the age of social media, where the enormous meat grinder of popular culture chews up news and spits out memes, highlight reels, TikTok videos and sound bytes. Shocking and juicy details extracted from Johnny Depp and Amber Heard’s marriage were perpetuated ad nauseam, distracting from the actual premise of the trial: a mere 12 words published by Heard in a Washington Post op-ed: “Then two years ago, I became a public figure representing domestic abuse …” Were these words defamatory or protected under the First Amendment? Despite the simplicity of that question, the case was muddied into a soap opera in which all semblance of privacy in Depp and Heard’s former marriage was obliterated through the airing of vivid, grotesque, sometimes gory testimony and evidence. The world watched along, interweaving itself into the trial: craving shock and punishment much before the trial’s arguments commenced.
Given this exhaustive coverage of Depp v. Heard, is there anything valuable to be learned, one year later, from the courtroom drawings? Rather than writing Depp v. Heard off as just another celebrity trial– salacious but with no real-world consequences– reexamining the entire ordeal in a fresh visual medium leads to revelations about the collision of contemporary and traditional modes of spectatorship. Brourman’s depictions from inside courtroom 5J offer something that the flatness and abbreviated quality of digital media lacks, namely, a humanization of the characters that distills atmosphere, emotion, action, relationships and gesture. In a departure from the naturalistic style of conventional court illustrators, Brourman’s immersive reporting falls within the lineage of Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson and his illustrator Ralph Steadman. She eschews any claims toward objectivity, instead leaning into her own positionality within the work, filling the negative space in her drawings with bits of overheard conversation, lines of testimony, and her own observations.
Given that courtroom sketches are very rarely, if ever, exhibited in a fine-art context, there were many curatorial challenges to consider when navigating the creation of Virginia is for Lovers. The decision to create a replica of courtroom 5J in the gallery was driven by a desire to mimic the spatial relationships present in the actual room. In transforming the gallery, subtle similarities between the venues of justice and art became apparent: both are ostensibly public spaces which are controlled by a historically elite class who impose rules governing what stays in and what’s left out. Specific architecture works in tandem with aesthetic choices to enforce these rules. We as the curators of Virginia is for Lovers acknowledge that the loaded environment of the courtroom might be uncomfortable, even traumatic for some viewers to enter. Rather than shying away from this response, the show seeks to explore it. The artificial and melodramatic qualities of the installation deliberately suggest the theatricality of the justice system: exposing that a hall of justice is also a stage— with the plaintiff, defendant, lawyers, judge, witnesses, jury and spectators performing on it.