Whether she’s helping create a rooftop installation or spontaneously painting a mural on the side of a building with a friend, University alumna Stephanie Landry is brightening up Baton Rouge one project at a time.
By the time she was 8 years old and making collages, the Baton Rouge native knew she wanted to be in artist. Landry was introduced to art at an early age when she spent time woodworking with her father, a carpenter.
“My dad was really supportive of me just being like a weird little creative kid,” Landry said. “He would just stick me in a corner and give me a hammer, nails, a little handsaw and some wood and would be like, ‘Here, entertain yourself.’”
This proposition thrilled her, she said, and still does. Since graduating in 2012, Landry has worked on a myriad of projects around the community.
Landry departed from her previous phase of painting landscapes with her current series, entitled “Are You Broken?” In the series, Landry photographs anyone who is willing to participate and asks them if they are broken, using their response as the caption for the piece. She then transfers the photograph to wood and makes a colorful wooden sculpture of their face.
Through the series, she hopes to capture different reactions to events in people’s lives and learn more about other people, she said.
She developed the idea months prior to the series’s first piece. First, she started experimenting on Photoshop with an image she took of herself in early 2016. Then after a hectic summer last year, she wanted her work to concentrate on other people instead of herself, she said. After a rough year personally and a volatile cycle of current events, she noticed talking to people helped both parties.
“You feel better. I feel better,” she said. “Hopefully someone will see this and be like, ‘Oh, OK.’”
To create these sculptures, which are typically a few feet tall, Landry adds different colors to the original photograph via Photoshop and transfers it onto wood with ink. Next, she cuts the wood with a specialty saw, takes everything apart, paints the wood and puts the pieces back together. The process is complicated and time-consuming, but Landry doesn’t seem to mind, she said.
“I like it,” Landry said. “I like to make really complicated stuff.”
Landry also worked with Casey Phillips of The Walls Project and several other artists to design a rooftop installation outside the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit in Women’s Hospital. They stuck with the hospital’s water theme but gave it a Louisiana spin, featuring swamp estuary animals. Landry designed the animals and the backdrop behind the installation.
The project took about six months to complete and was the biggest project Landry had worked on, she said. The experience was intensive but rewarding.
“To get onto the rooftop we had to walk into the NICU every single day,” Landry said. “Even just walking through it — it’s tense.”
She hopes the installation can bring a moment of peace for parents and families in a time of extreme stress, she said.
After the installation, Landry partnered with University alumnus Clark Derbes and used leftover paint to create a new mark on the city. Driving around, they found a white garage door on the side of Mid City Redevelopment and painted a vibrant geometric mural on it.
“I’m usually super meticulous so it was nice to have no plans and just do what feels right,” Landry said.
Apart from the “Are You Broken?” series, Landry is working on a side series called “Remember Their Names” where she creates digital art of “people that were basically just killed for either being who they are or standing up for something they really truly believed in,” she said.
Through the project, she wants to highlight the victims of violence rather than the perpetrators, she said. She had the idea after hearing about the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in August and feeling like the coverage was more on the marchers at the rally than people who were hurt or killed, she said.
Landry also designed heels for one of the participants in Sexual Trauma Awareness and Response’s Hunks and Heels benefit at the Varsity Theatre — a project she was particularly excited about because the man was dressing up as Freddie Mercury, who she loves “more than anything.”
The heels she designed have a style similar to her “Are You Broken?” series with painted wooden triangles and stamped images of Mercury and his guitars.
“I was like, ‘What’s the most ridiculous thing I could do? Maybe make his heels look like a stage,” Landry said.
While her projects vary vastly in scope, most of them focus on exploring human nature and learning about other people.
“I just want people to think of things outside of themselves,” Landry said.

Gallery • 5 Photos

Dilyn Stewart

LSU alumna Stephanie Landry showcases some of her artwork on Sunday, Oct. 22, 2017 at French Truck Coffee on Government Street.