An artist’s take on the court system

For the past few months, visual reporter Verónica Martinez has been painting a mural in our office. Headphones on, pants flecked with paint, she stands on a stepladder, breathing life into the 22-by-8-foot wall layer by layer.

If you’ve followed Injustice Watch for a while, you know Martinez’s work. Her illustrations are featured in many of our investigations and on the cover of our judicial election guides, and her courtroom sketches visualize what happens in Cook County’s courtrooms — where cameras aren’t allowed.

The new mural is her most time-intensive project for Injustice Watch to date.

Martinez said a major source of inspiration for the mural came from Carl Sandburg’s poem “Chicago.” “You can’t talk about the history of journalism in Chicago without talking about Carl Sandburg,” she said. She used the Chicago cityscape to anchor the design and included several symbols from the poem within it.

For example, Sandburg describes Chicago as “fierce as a dog,” which Martinez said echoed in words like “dogged” and “watchdog” — terms she associates with Injustice Watch.  “That immediately gave me an image of a dog in a protective stance,” she said. The dog appears on the lower left of the mural.

Martinez sent a questionnaire to everyone at Injustice Watch to gather ideas for the mural design. She said she used a combination of questionnaire responses, Sandburg’s poem, and her own ideas to structure the composition.

The concept of shedding light on systemic abuses of power became a central image. The light emanating from the flashlight, she said, divides the design diagonally and creates the contrast between the purple and green sides of the mural. The person crouching near the flashlight represents the new generation of journalists.

When it comes to illustrating Injustice Watch’s work generally, a big challenge is that the activities of the court are often not visually dynamic. “You can only draw stacks of papers for so long,” she said.

So she used the glow of the flashlight to create a split view of the courthouse. “If I want the light to shine on the courthouse, what would it show? How would I represent that?” she remembered thinking. “And then I started thinking about gears.” The gears on the right side of the wall became her way of depicting the inner workings of the court system.

Martinez also drew inspiration from some of her favorite murals — including Diego Rivera’s “Detroit Industry Murals” — when drawing figures like the printing press workers.

“I really liked the idea of adding a printing press,” she said. “I was thinking about how impactful that was, and how it opened up a window to the world for many people for the first time. And I just wanted to have a nod to that history.”

Martinez said her experience taking different types of classes while at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago is part of what shapes her work. Acting classes, for instance, taught her to think about a story in terms of beats and the distinct emotion represented in each beat. “But instead of thinking about the character, I’m thinking about what the reader is taking from these beats,” she said. “What is the emotional part of the story?”

At Injustice Watch, we cover systemic inequities and harms, but we try not to leave readers with a sense of despair. Martinez felt the same way about the mural. “A lot of people’s stories don’t have a happy ending,” she said. “I see the protesters as a symbol of hope — they’re people who haven’t given up — and the people dancing on the rooftop. I wanted to make sure there were moments of joy or hope within the mural, even though we’re talking about serious topics.”