If one measure of good art is its capacity to make us feel, then the best works often embody an invitation to grow. Multidisciplinary creator JJJJJerome Ellis has a term for offerings that act as olive branches to a gentler world: “gatherings.” I can assure you that what may at first brush sound like abstract art-speak takes on a more visceral quality when experienced in the flesh. Two summers ago, I had the opportunity to enter Ellis’ sonic universe of careful anticipation myself.
That evening, the artist, who uses all pronouns, strode down the grassy hill of the Getty Museum in Los Angeles wearing a flowing floral gown and carrying a saxophone. They stopped under a canopy of bougainvillea, gazing out at the small audience sprawled among the dripping fountains and rose bushes. As the sunlight grew golden, Ellis read a poem about time. She stammered throughout — a pattern of speech, I would learn, they have navigated since childhood. It was during those pauses between words that I perceived a shift overtake the audience. From our patience grew a kinder kind of listening: together, we became no longer attendees of a show, but participants in a moment — one whose intimacy came with a choice.
“To be vulnerable with someone is to give them the ability to hurt, or to further the connection,” Ellis tells me over the phone. “That’s how I think of stuttering: You can interrupt me, you can roll your eyes, you can make fun of me, or you can gather inside. You can go into that moment, and you can practice being in-time with me.”
Once JJJJJerome Ellis drew the saxophone to his lips, playing a series of clipped notes that bloomed into rich, airy melodies, their work of transubstantiation revealed itself in full: The stammer was no longer an impediment. It was music.
The descendent of a long line of preachers, Ellis once sought to counteract the stutter, to bend their voice into more normative patterns. Yet it was in church that the Virginia-based artist first saw speech — specifically the manipulation of rhythm, volume, timbre, tone, and cadence — as a medium where “ceremony…might be housed,” they say.
This attunement to the aesthetic possibilities of the collective appears across Ellis’ ever-expanding body of work. In “Aster of Ceremonies,” a book, audio, and performance based project, Ellis invokes a cast of ancestors to join them in a meditation on what it means for Black and disabled people to take their freedom. With “Benediction,” a musical ceremony that honors plant kin, Ellis communes with the ferns and flowers that aided enslaved people in their journeys across 19th Century Virginia.
Of this writing, Jjjjjerome Ellis has shared their songs, writings, and ceremonies from the Tate Modern in London to the Ballroom in Marfa, to the Whitney in New York, and beyond. One recent afternoon, striding through a forest of blue flowers, Ellis and I spoke about learning from plants, the architecture of sound, and the meaning of being “in-time” versus “on-time.”
I’d like to begin with some autobiography. Where do you trace your roots as an artist?
A big root for me is the preaching tradition in my mom’s family. My aunt is a preacher. My uncle is a preacher. My late grandfather, he was a preacher. He was the reverend of a church that he and my grandma founded in the ‘80s in Brooklyn. He was the head pastor until he died in 2020 at the age of 100. And he was still giving sermons at that age.
I struggled a lot with church growing up and I no longer attend. Still, I developed a great love for my aunts and my grandfather and the way that they preached, how they tapped into West Indian as well as African and North American Black traditions. Preaching for me is so musical. I was taken with the specific ways that they would engage rhythm and volume and timbre and tone and cadence in their preaching. I am not a minister, nor do I want to be, but what I feel so rooted in is the desire to use music and speech to create space where ceremony, reverence, and worship might be housed.
I appreciate this language of “creating space,” as your performances often foster experiences of heightened collectivity, as if your stutter is an invitation to an audience to join in friendly anticipation. How did you learn that there was the possibility of art within your stutter?
For most of my life, I tried everything I could to release the stutter. I used different breathing techniques, different ways of holding my muscles — making a fist when I feel an oncoming stutter and opening it to lessen it. I’d introduce myself as John instead of as Jerome to avoid stuttering on my name. I tried so many things to avoid being pulled into that moment, to foreclose as much as I could in that space. It’s taken many people to help me reframe my approach, including my mentor and friend Iya Milta Vega Cardona, who is an anti-racist organizer and educator, among other vocations. She taught me to place the stutter within the context of ancestry; that it can be an opportunity to open a channel of communication with ancestors, as my stutter was passed down to me through my mother’s family.
These images of an ancestral channel help me navigate the stammer, which can be vulnerable for the speaker and listener. The question becomes: How are we going to handle this space? One way is to avoid it, because it may be uncomfortable, or simply a deviation from the norm. Another way is to take that space as an opportunity for collective experience, a gathering. We can receive this vulnerability as a gift.
Beautiful. I’m intrigued by this idea of “being in-time,” which I recognize as a separate concept than being “on-time.” Can you elaborate on this distinction?
What is being on-time versus in-time? One day I was with my dad in his garden, and there were lots of bees flying around the plants. He didn’t want the bees to be there, and so he said, “I’m going to cut the flowers, and I’m going to cut the buds as well, so that the bees will go away.”
I often know in advance if I’m going to stutter. The word becomes like a bud, as if the stutter has yet to bloom. Depending on the syllable, sometimes when that word arises, I can use my breath and mouth muscles to suppress the stutter. Sometimes, I do that, and it’s fine. Other times, I try to practice letting the stutters bloom as fully as they want to. This takes focus because I have so many ingrained habits of trying everything I can do to avoid stuttering. One answer to what being “in-time” is to me, is to bloom in full stutter.
It’s as if your work configures time itself as a kind of medium.
Yes. A few years ago, I did a short reading for the Poetry Project’s New Year’s Day marathon. In order to keep things equitable, organizers tell performers to limit themselves to two to three minutes. Of course, I totally support everybody having equal access to time. But for my reading, I was interested in scrutinizing how this construct applies when someone’s ability impacts their capacity to adhere to a limit. My reading was explicitly about this subject, and ended up being 11 minutes long. I had written the piece as if I wouldn’t stutter, and when I practiced it, the piece lasted only a couple of minutes. During the performance, because it went 11 minutes long, I was not on-time. But because I was practicing stuttering openly and fully, I felt that I was in-time.
Blooming seems like such a potent theme across your works, in that it not only touches on time, but also one of your other great subjects: the natural world. In “Benediction,” for instance, you pay particular homage to the plants that Black ancestors would have seen and potentially utilized while moving across the landscapes of Virginia. What have plants taught you about living, working, and being in community?
I have to begin this answer by naming my wife Luísa Black Ellis, who is a poet — my favorite poet — as well as an educator, ecologist, and landscape designer. She is my teacher in so many things, including plants.
For me, I’ve really loved spending time with plants and animals since I was a child. I remember feeling like I could commune with them without having to engage the stutter directly. I don’t think I really realized this consciously until I was older, but even as a kid it was stressful spending time with humans. I was scared of being made fun of, of the physical labor of the stutter. With plants and animals, I could just be with these things who were clearly alive and could communicate clearly without speaking.
Can you speak about how these relationships impact you more tangibly?
My mom’s dad, the reverend I mentioned earlier, came to the United States from Jamaica, where he was a farmer. And his father was a farmer. And his father was a farmer. In my relationship with plants, which usually takes the form of gardening, I can feel their hands in my hands. I can feel those generations. I have a copy of my grandparents’ marriage license. And on it, my grandfather’s occupation is listed as “cultivator.” I was so grateful to find that, to see his specific relationship with plants framed as one of cultivation. For me, it implies care.
The theorist José Esteban Muñoz famously wrote of queerness as a horizon. He also cast particular kinds of performance as offering glimpses into a future where queerness has arrived. What are some works — whether music, poetry, film — that have offered you glimpses of a freer future?
I’d say the album, The Long Count by Debit. It marries music and technology in a way that is very of this moment. It shows me a freer future in sound.
Thank you, JJJJJerome. During these times of such raw hostility on a global scale, where do you look for peace, and where do you look for purpose?
One of the places that I look for peace and purpose is in libraries. My sister and brother both work in libraries — specifically programming for young people, children, and babies. Luísa has worked in libraries for years as well, and I have, too. Public libraries model how we can and should treat one another. They help keep people nourished, mentally and spiritually. They keep people cool, keep people warm. They offer all kinds of service that so many people need — and all for free. These are places I so often look for peace and purpose.
This conversation has been edited and condensed.
