Country Roads Magazine "Visual Arts Issue" November 2021

On the Cover: “EXTINCT IN THE WILD”

Cover image by Courtney Egan

By Jordan LaHaye Fontenot

Cover image by Courtney Egan At Natchez’s inaugural Allumer event, to be staged at Dunleith November 19–21, Courtney Egan’s botanical projections will bloom across the greenhouse walls. Using light and technology, and inspired by the distinct flora of her home city New Orleans—Egan will display her interpretation of the festival’s thrust: rebirth and renewal. In this 2021 Visual Arts issue, art illuminates our cities—quite literally in Natchez’s showcase of light-based art installations (page 38), contemplatively across New Orleans as artists from across the globe set up for the triennial exhibition, Prospect.5 (30), and hyper-locally at Baton Rouge’s newest artist’s haven, Mid City Artisans (36). Against the turbulent backdrop of our world’s current, complicated state—it is certainly a gift to live in a region offering so many opportunities to explore issues like climate change, race, identity, and more through the lenses of our region’s creative masterminds and their work. Coming back to our cover—Egan’s “Extinct in the Wild” presents the Angel’s Trumpet—an ornamental that, today, only propagates through human cultivation. So it is with art, and with change. Neither occurs without us. Neither can.

Courtney Egan