Column: For more than 40 years, sketch artist Andy Austin captured our courtrooms' crimes and characters

Chicago Tribune

a day ago

Andy Austin was an artist drawn to the activities, antics, boredom, rare joy and frequent heartbreaks of the dramas that play out in the courtrooms of our city, vividly capturing their characters and crimes for more than 40 years.
'I never planned to be an artist,' she told me long ago. 'It just happened.'
Austin died in April in Maine. She was 89 years old and had been planning an exhibition in a local gallery.
The career of Ann Rutherfurd Collier, a relative of the McCormick family that founded the International Harvester Company, may not have been what was expected of a Vassar College English major, born in Chicago and raised in Boston, and the wife of a music teacher and composer at a private school here, and mother of two children living on Astor Street in the Gold Coast.
In the late 1960s, her children in school all day, she explored ways to exercise her interest in art, which she had studied in Florence, Italy, after college. She wandered the city, finding suitable subjects in such things as the older men playing chess on the beach at North Avenue. And then in 1969, a notable trial came calling.
'I thought that might be interesting to draw,' she said, referring to the trial, which involved what was called the Chicago Eight (soon Chicago Seven), who faced a variety of changes, such as conspiracy and inciting a riot during the 1968 Democratic National Convention, in what would be one of the defining legal cases of the time.
She went to court, and though her art supplies at first were confiscated because she wasn't a member of the press, she snuck them in and started sketching. Eventually allowed in the press section, she showed her work to WLS-Ch. 7 reporter Hugh Hill, who was so impressed that he hired her on the spot.
And soon she drew a bound and gagged Bobby Seale, one of the defendants in the trial. It was a powerful image that would appear not only on local TV but in newspapers across the country.
Her career was launched, and she would be there for the next four decades, there when Governors George Ryan and Rod Blagojevich were there; serial killer John Wayne Gacy, mobster Joey the Clown, the members of the drug-trafficking El-Rukns gang, mob hitman Harry Aleman and hundreds of more ordinary others.
Her sketches and watercolors were powerful and arresting, often embellished by her notes about who she was drawing and other significant observations.
She was part of what was a predominantly and powerful female group of artists, which also included pioneers such as Marcia Danits, Carol Renaud, and soon-to-retire Cheryl Cook, who brought the faces of the courts to millions watching TV and reading newspapers.
Her daughter, Sasha Austin, told me, 'My mother lived in two opposing worlds: a fancy bohemian one, and another of gritty crime, and she loved them both.'
I knew Andy, first meeting her more than 50 years ago when she was the ebullient wife of my high school's music teacher, John Austin, and got to know her better during her courtroom career. She was charming in an almost girlish way, but quietly glamorous too. WBBM-Ch. 2's Bill Kurtis first met her when he was covering the Chicago Seven trial and referred to her evermore as 'the Lana Turner of courtroom art,' recalling that movie star discovered at a drug store.
As the years went on and the drawings piled up, Austin told me more than once, 'Sketches are wonderful material for stories. But the sketches can't tell the whole story of these fascinating trials and people.' That's one of the reasons she wrote a terrific 2008 book, 'Rule 53: Capturing Hippies, Spies, Politicians, and Murderers in an American Courtroom.'
I interviewed her about it at a 2008 Printers Row event and read some of her fine writing to the crowd. Here she described State Senator John D'Arco: 'I was struck by how small and neat he was, like a well-designed pocketknife.' Or this on a witness: '(He) came limping in on a cane. Hunched over in rumpled, pale silk clothes, hair parted in the middle like a 1920s movie star, he could have been a burnt-out playboy, someone you might see hobbling along the boardwalk at a second-rate European spa. He had an out-of-season look about him.' We did not talk about the book's pages about her pain of losing her teenage son in a fatal car crash on Lake Shore Drive, or her divorce or her daughter.
And we never spoke again. I wrote her a note after hearing about the death of her second husband, the esteemed University of Chicago professor Ted Cohen in 2014 and someone told me she had moved to Maine, a place where she had spent some of her childhood summers with her parents and grandparents.
I knew that she had donated more than 3,000 of her watercolor sketches to the Pritzker Legal Research Center. And when I heard about her death I also heard that she had written a novel, 'The Bar Harbor Formation.' I ordered a copy.
The day after I heard of her death I read a great Chicago magazine story by the prolific Bob Chiarito.
It was about courtroom artists and in it he wrote, 'There are still court sketch artists in Chicago — although their days may be numbered as more and more courts allow cameras in. Currently, there are two main sketch artists who freelance for the television news stations and newspapers in town … down from the days when every station and newspaper in town had their own courtroom sketch artist on staff.'
Those were Andy Austin's days and she lived them fully.