Created in connection with the Baltimore Museum of Art’s Turn Again to the Earth initiative, Call to Light, Earth Responds is an ode to call-and-response music in African American culture and is inspired by Harriet Tubman’s relationship with nature and our innate connection to plants in how we grow, bend, and move in our attempts to thrive.
Incorporating elements of Alvin Ailey’s “Revelations” and drawing upon Justen Leroy’s three-channel film installation Lay Me Down in Praise (2022), Vetiver combines their inherited Black ancestry, spirituality, and knowledge of medicinal plants to convey our inevitable likeness to the earth that surrounds us and insists on our growth.
Africans escaping slavery followed the guidance of the North Star similar to how a vine climbs the brightest stretch of sunlight up an oak tree. The environments in which we grow and our proximity to nourishment inform our aliveness and alikeness. Baltimore has become a home for many people from near and far and is made up of vegetation, like the essence of its people, that helps sustain the quality of life through the exchange of energy, nutrients, and resources. Our biological makeup, temperaments we embody, food we consume, medicines we concoct, and experiences we endure are ultimately interrelated.
Participants embarked on a scavenger hunt around Harriet Tubman Grove in Wyman Park Dell to identify plants native to Baltimore. Used natural watercolors made from native plants and those that Tubman used for making medicine, such as sassafras and geranium, to create a linocut painting inspired by their connection with their spiritual and holistic benefits.
