JJJJJerome Ellis is an artist, performer, musician, and stutterer who explores notions of dysfluency through Blackness, language, music, and time as a strategy for resistance and survival. In the exhibition JJJJJerome Ellis: Contradictions, Ellis reveals how stuttering can disrupt assumed temporal parameters by creating and extending time.

The video work transCRIPted (2020) was created following a poetry performance at Poetry Project, New York. Each participant was given a two-minute time slot to complete their readings. Ellis flagged that the allotted time allowance—intended to be an equalizer for participants—would prove exclusionary to people who stutter. Understanding Ellis’s position, the venue gave them the time needed to perform. TransCRIPted is a visualization of that performance as the artist transcribes the spoken, stuttered word revealing how both speaker and listener can grant the gift of time.

Impediment is Information (2021) was created to mark the occasion of Juneteenth as Ellis contemplated how speech can have enormous implications—such as the official proclamation that granted more than 3.5 million people freedom in 1863. This music video poem centers on an eighteenth-century newspaper advertisement for the recapture of a fugitive slave described as having “an impediment in his speech.” Ellis seeks new meanings by rearranging the advertisement’s words to create poetry. The work creates connections between the pathologizing of Blackness—such as through Drapetomania, a pseudo-scientific illness to explain what causes enslaved people to run away—and the abnormalizing of stuttered speech. Together, these works celebrate what emerges from dysfluency and asynchronous time.

JJJJJerome Ellis (Grenadian-Jamaican American, born 1989) is a stuttering, Afro-Caribbean composer, poet, and performer based in Norfolk, Virginia. Ellis has collaborated with choreographers, rappers, playwrights, booksellers, typographers, podcasters, toddlers, and filmmakers. They have performed at acclaimed venues such as Tate Modern in London; The Whitney Biennial and Highline in New York; and UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance in California, among many others. As a composer, Ellis was awarded a 2015 Fulbright Fellowship. Ellis earned a B.A. in music theory and ethnomusicology from Columbia University.

This exhibition is curated by Chelsea Pierce, PhD, McKinnon Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, and organized by the Chrysler Museum of Art.