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At this year\u2019s Whitney Biennial, entitled \u201cEven Better Than the Real Thing\u201d and comprising more than 70 artists, co-curators and organizers Chrissie Iles and Meg Onli aimed to bring together what they describe as a \u201cdissonant chorus.\u201d Among the artistic voices is multidisciplinary artist JJJJJerome Ellis, whose practices\u2014music, performance, writing\u2014bring 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: \u201cSince the show opened, I’ve been able to spend slow, reflective time with the works by these incredible artists,\u201d they wrote to VF<\/em> this week. \u201cMy 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.\u201d) The other is a text-based billboard, written in Mandarin, Spanish, and English (among New York City\u2019s most commonly spoken languages), in which symbols represent the pauses and repetitions of stuttering. The billboard was a serendipitous fit for the Biennial\u2019s theme.<\/p>\n \u201cI actually didn’t learn that, that phrase, a \u2018dissonant chorus,\u2019 until after we had made the billboard,\u201d Ellis says. \u201cWe had already been in the spirit of it. And because the Biennial is\u2014for me\u2014it’s so much about, about the plural, about, about, about the multiple, I’m honored to be able to be one voice, among many.\u201d<\/p>\n 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<\/em>, incorporate Ellis\u2019s stutter as intrinsic to the sonic experience), Ellis relished the opportunity to be highly collaborative, even crowdsourcing ideas from young students who stutter.<\/p>\n \u201cWe can all be singing together,\u201d they say, \u201cbut there can be divergence, there can be difference.\u201d<\/p>\n The importance of the collective is always top of mind. \u201cThere 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,\u201d Ellis says, \u201cthe idea that, that, that the health of the river is\u2014the idea that, that the, that the health of the river is anything other than inextricable from my health.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n