What does Justice look like?

With iconographical roots in Ancient Egypt, western representations of Justice have typically taken the form of a blindfolded woman holding a pair of scales and a sword. This solemn allegory, which often adorns the walls and buildings of institutions administering justice, remains a powerful symbol that must be interrogated. Legal scholars and art historians have questioned the adequacy of such a demiurgic conception of justice and described how this image synthesized various judicial processes or yielded conflicting interpretations. More recently, art historians like Sarah Elizabeth Lewis have sought visions of justice in different kinds of images such as photographs of Civil Rights era protests. Building on these robust precedents, this panel seeks contributions examining how artists have attempted to portray justice in different historical and geographical contexts. Whether allegories, utopian visions of peace, images of struggles against injustices, or representations of punishment, this panel contends that a just society cannot be achieved without a clear picture of what justice looks like. Ultimately, it seeks to demonstrate how the visual arts can play a generative role in shaping visions of justice for the twenty-first century.