Vetiver

Vetiver (Vonne Napper) (b. 1989) is a transdisciplinary artist, facilitator, educator, printmaker, and land steward. Their practice centers on preserving Black queer & trans identities and co-creating with the earth and others through holistic approaches. Identifying as nonbinary & trans-masculine, Vetiver draws on their lived experience to highlight the challenges of existing at a particularly targeted intersection in society, and on their ancestry and relationship with nature to establish connections among the communities to which they belong.

Vetiver is an intuitive autodidact and earned their Master of Fine Arts in Community Arts at Maryland Institute College of Art. They developed the first arts-based program for middle school students, The Roundhouse Connection, at the B&O Railroad Museum, and have exhibited their work and facilitated programming in Baltimore, the DMV, and New York areas including the Peale Museum, Virginia Commonwealth University, Prince George’s African American Museum and Cultural Center, Transformer DC, Gallery Y (YMCA Anthony Bowen), Baltimore Clayworks, Baltimore Museum of Art, and Eleventh Hour Art.

Artist Statement

My art practice is a modality for healing that employs the inherent connection between plant biodiversity and humanity to critique ingrained perceptions of gender and sexuality. Centered on Black queer and trans people, my work is an act of resistance, evoking the feeling of joy and pride while fighting against erasure and violence.

When we critically analyze ourselves as a society and our overlapping traits, we have the opportunity to shift how we view our differences, respecting and honoring the way they inform and contribute to our collective existence and evolution. For years, the world has benefited from the social changes initiated by Black queer and trans people. Yet we are one of the most unprotected groups, with our rights and our lives constantly being taken from us. Growing up, I had no idea we truly existed due to religious barriers and underrepresentation in media and literature. When printmaking and oral histories entered my life in graduate school, I knew where I needed to direct my efforts.

With cultural memory and inherited land stewardship, my method involves rituals and research, working with plants and other natural materials to create linocut portraiture and eco-conscious textiles rooted in Black traditions and liberative embodiment. These artistic offerings sustain accurate identification and narratives of the marginalized yet powerful communities to which I belong. By linking the spiritual symbolism of plants and the ecosystems in which they thrive with the attributes and lived experiences of Black queer and trans people, I emphasize the intrinsic strength of our biological vastness, which is often rendered as sparse compared to more historically accepted binary forms of representation.

My creative process is ever-evolving. I begin work from one perspective, pulling from my first-hand experience, then I examine it with others from an objective angle. As I allow alchemical change to occur during its creation, the resulting artwork is a network of connected ideas. Ultimately, my pieces develop their own conceptual language. For this reason, I create work that encourages the viewer to question all ideas about life itself, especially new ways of relating to others.