The Artist Who Blocked An Ice Projectile With Her Drawing Board During Protests The Art Newspaper International Art News And Events

A drawing board, raised in self-defense, became the clearest evidence in a Minneapolis protest scene that artist Izzy Brourman and her collaborators say should alarm anyone watching federal immigration enforcement in the United States. On January 24, while documenting demonstrations against Immigration and Customs Enforcement violence, Brourman was targeted by a masked federal agent who fired pepper balls at point-blank range. One projectile hit her board instead of her body, leaving a hole and a jagged dent in the wood and paper.

Brourman was in Minneapolis with her partner, Peter Hambrecht, and her close friend Jeannette Berlin as part of a long-term project tracking the Trump administration's aggressive immigration tactics. The three had planned to continue documenting the protests, but the day quickly became part of the story they were trying to record. Hambrecht and Berlin, both former news journalists, filmed the encounter from different angles and said the footage shows Brourman did nothing to provoke the agent.

Berlin said the incident was not exceptional, only unusually well documented. In her view, what happened to Brourman is happening regularly to people carrying protest signs, but most of those encounters are never captured from multiple angles. She argued that the combination of local reporting and independent outlets is increasingly important as coverage of immigration enforcement grows more urgent and traditional newsrooms shrink.

The trio has no intention of stopping. They plan to keep producing Brourman's drawings, which Berlin described as abstracted but immediate, along with short-form video portraits for their website and Instagram account. They are also developing a longer documentary built from footage they have gathered since Donald Trump's fraud trial in New York in 2023.

For Brourman, the work has become inseparable from the events it records. She said covering the Trump trials and immigration court cases has changed her, and that making art now functions as a survival tool - a way to preserve her perception of events that can otherwise feel almost unreal.

Berlin framed the project as part of a broader shift in media culture, where audiences are looking for coverage that reflects their own reality. In that landscape, the trio's work sits between witness testimony and visual journalism, insisting that the act of looking can still carry public consequence.

MENAFN09042026005694012507ID1110961094