The Whitney Biennial Welcomes a “Dissonant Chorus” of Artists

At this year’s Whitney Biennial, entitled “Even Better Than the Real Thing” and comprising more than 70 artists, co-curators and organizers Chrissie Iles and Meg Onli aimed to bring together what they describe as a “dissonant chorus.” Among the artistic voices is multidisciplinary artist JJJJJerome Ellis, whose practices—music, performance, writing—bring up inquiries of time, dysfluency, and the inclusive futures stuttering pride and disability justice promise. Ellis is contributing two site-specific works to the survey. One is a score they will write only after the show opens. (There is a blank, anticipatory place in the gallery: “Since the show opened, I’ve been able to spend slow, reflective time with the works by these incredible artists,” they wrote to VF this week. “My goal with the score is to honor the work of those who have worked to create this biennial. How do I do that? I don’t know yet.”) The other is a text-based billboard, written in Mandarin, Spanish, and English (among New York City’s most commonly spoken languages), in which symbols represent the pauses and repetitions of stuttering. The billboard was a serendipitous fit for the Biennial’s theme.

“I actually didn’t learn that, that phrase, a ‘dissonant chorus,’ until after we had made the billboard,” Ellis says. “We had already been in the spirit of it. And because the Biennial is—for me—it’s so much about, about the plural, about, about, about the multiple, I’m honored to be able to be one voice, among many.”

To design the billboard, Ellis formed a collective, People Who Stutter Create, bringing together doctoral student Jia Bin, poet Delicia Daniels, designer Conor Foran, and speech language therapist Kristel Kubart. Although typically a solo artist who delves into the specific syncopations of their own speech (their projects, including the 2021 debut album, The Clearing, incorporate Ellis’s stutter as intrinsic to the sonic experience), Ellis relished the opportunity to be highly collaborative, even crowdsourcing ideas from young students who stutter.

“We can all be singing together,” they say, “but there can be divergence, there can be difference.”

The importance of the collective is always top of mind. “There are these specific practices that crip and disabled folks have developed around interdependence that, that, that, that refute, very explicitly, the idea of being separable,” Ellis says, “the idea that, that, that the health of the river is—the idea that, that the, that the health of the river is anything other than inextricable from my health.”