The Women Who Sketch Justice at Work

Jane Rosenberg with her sketch of Anthony Weiner, crying during his sentencing. It's part of an exhibit in the Moynihan federal courthouse in Lower Manhattan

For nearly 40 years, artist Elizabeth Williams has had a front-row seat to courtroom dramas involving everyone from Harvey Weinstein to corporate fraudsters and, more recently, the rapper Tekashi 6ix9ine. “It’s like he’s a tattooed fashion model!” she exclaimed. 

We’re in the lobby of the Daniel Patrick Moynihan United States Courthouse in Lower Manhattan, where the walls are covered with 127 sketches of cases heard in the Southern District of New York. They went up last year and were all produced by three courtroom artists with long careers in New York City: Williams, Jane Rosenberg and Aggie Whelan Kenny. 

They’re among a very small cadre of freelance artists - all women with decades of experience — whose work is used by TV stations, websites and newspapers because cameras aren’t allowed in federal courts. This old-fashioned craft is easily overlooked at a time when photos and videos rule the Internet and social media. But these artists are still very passionate about the value they add to journalism.

Williams still gets excited when recalling some of her more memorable courtroom moments. “It’s such a good story,” she’ll say.

One of her favorites is a case involving the oil company Chevron and indigenous people from Ecuador that wound up in New York. She points to a man in her 2014 scene of the trial.

“He showed up in court wearing his traditional Ecuadorian robes with the shell necklace and the feathered headdress,” she said. 

She drew the Ecuadorian man’s accessories and orange shirt in lively contrast to the usual dark suits worn by the judge and translator. For courtroom artists like Williams, who see people in the same business attire every day, this scene was a gift. “You don’t see stuff like this,” she said. 

Williams went to Parsons and started off as a fashion illustrator before finding work in the courts, first in Los Angeles and later New York City. Her drawings have flow and movement. She starts with sketching a likeness, explaining that if you don’t have the basics, like a hand that’s drawn properly, “you’ve got nothing.” Then she fills in the colors, using brush pens, colored pencils and sometimes an oil stick. “It’s a very complicated way of working,” she says, ‘But these look like the real courtroom colors. The color’s bright, it’s really rich and it holds up.” 

It may take five or 10 attempts to get it right, but that also depends on how much time she has in court. Arraignments happen quickly but an artist can spend an hour or more drawing a witness.

Jane Rosenberg was studying art in college when she saw a lecture by a courtroom artist. Intrigued, she attended night court in Manhattan one evening and drew the prostitutes waiting to be arraigned. 

“And then I started asking the court officers, where do the artists sit?”

Pretty soon, she had a portfolio ready and got her first gig drawing a case for NBC. “I watched my little black and white TV at home, and called my parents,” she recalled. 

Rosenberg has been in court for cases involving mobsters, defense attorney-turned-conspirator Lynne Stewart, boxing promoter Don King (“I love drawing his hair”) and terrorists. They’re all included in the exhibit. So is her portrait of former Congressman Anthony Weiner, as he cried during his sentencing in 2017 for texting sexually explicit messages to a teenage girl. His face is lined with grief and his shoulders are stooped.

There’s also a surreal drawing of Abu Hamza al-Masri, who was sentenced to life in prison for conspiring to establish a militant training camp. His hands were blown off years ago during an explosion, and Rosenberg captured the awkward moment when he took the oath.

“You have to raise your right hand and swear to tell the truth,” she said. “And you can see he just has a stump.”

Rosenberg uses pastels to build bold colors and lines. She wheels around a big kit with all her supplies. She’s got a pillow, or “tush cush,” for the long hours she spends sitting on hard benches; binoculars to see faces; a foam board to position her drawing on her lap as she works; pens and a special box for her pastels. She made it herself when she first started working in courtrooms.

“It’s rubber-banded and held together with gaffer’s tape,” she explained. Inside, there are separate compartments for the different colored pastels and screens to capture their dust. She said she always wears dark colors to court, to avoid getting too dirty. 

Although courtroom artists work in obscurity, occasionally an image goes viral. Rosenberg caught a lot of flack when critics thought she made New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady look like Lurch from the “Addams Family” during the DeflateGate trial. She said he was very hard to draw among the crowd of people in court that day, and acknowledged having regrets. 

“That’s just the way my job is,” she said, with an air of resignation. “I can’t do it right every time. I do the best I can at the moment.”

Rosenberg also drew New York immigration judges for a WNYC report earlier this year.

Aggie Whelan Kenny didn’t have a plan in mind while studying painting as a NYU grad student.  But “I just always assumed I’d be an artist,” she said. 

The Massachusetts native started working in courtrooms in the 1970s through word of mouth. Back then, she said, the artists went to court with a producer and reporter. Couriers would pick up the drawings and bring them to the TV studios, or the artwork would be shot on film by a camera person waiting outside before a segment went to air.

“I had a contract with CBS network,” she said, followed by another one with ABC. Today the artists are entirely freelance. There used to be about a dozen of them, she recalled; now there’s just about half that number.

“If a young person would want to break into this line of work it’s very difficult,” she said. 

Difficult because there’s only so much space for courtroom art in a shrinking news market. And in this digital age, deadlines come even faster. “It’s getting to court, often on the big trials at the crack of dawn,” Kenny explained. “Your competition is right there wanting the same vantage point, wanting everything you need.”

The artists grab the closest seats they can, either on a front row bench or in an empty jury box if allowed. Getting close allowed Kenny to paint former Philippine First Lady Imelda Marcus looking regal, dressed in a formal blue gown at her arraignment. It’s a shock of color in a room where Kenny made everyone else look faded and flat. She paints with watercolors that she keeps in a box about the size of an iPad.

In the trial involving a woman claiming to be Bill Cosby’s daughter, who was sentenced to prison for extortion, Kenny focused on Cosby’s face. “He was very still and unemotional,” she recalled.

But some courtroom scenes just don’t have as much drama, either because the defendant isn’t famous or because there’s really no action. Kenny has one painting in which she focused on the fingers of the stenographer. “You can find things that are really lovely to draw,” she said.

Kenny loves her work and feels lucky to have found a niche. “I just think it's been a wonderful experience to be able to spend a good part of my life drawing,” she said.

Every courtroom scene on exhibit in the Moynihan courthouse includes a judge from the Southern District. Williams said she thinks this shows them as “civil servants in the truest sense” and that visitors will learn about the role of the judiciary when they see the pictures.  

All three women acknowledge it can be upsetting listening to testimony about gruesome cases. They never watch courtroom dramas on television. Kenny and Williams started Illustrated Courtship for painting portraits of weddings, which are much happier affairs than trials. Rosenberg makes plein air outdoor New York City scenes.

If cameras ever are allowed in federal courts, Kenny said they might capture a moment more accurately. But courtrooms are the last places in the news business where artists get to draw that singular image. Kenny said viewers get a different feeling when they look at something made by an artist.

“What you’re looking at is their response to what they see,” she said. 

And that artist’s view tells a very different kind of story than a photograph.  

On November 20th, a second exhibit of courtroom drawings will open at the federal courthouse in White Plains. 

Beth Fertig is a senior reporter covering courts and legal affairs at WNYC. You can follow her on Twitter at @bethfertig.