 |
JJJJJerome Ellis (any pronoun) is a disabled Grenadian-Jamaican-American artist, surfer, and person who stutters. The artist works across music, performance, writing, video, and photography. JJJJJerome has the great privilege of being married to poet-ecologist Luísa Black Ellis. They live in a monastery on a creek in traditional Chesapioc and Nansemond territory, Virginia USA. JJJJJerome dreams of building a sonic bath house! Concepts that organize the artist’s practice include: unknowing, improvisation, fugitivity, illegibility, inheritance, opacity, prayer, gap, contradiction, aporia, eternity, unpredictability, interruption, and silence. Ellis researches relationships among blackness, disabled speech, divinity, nature, sound, and time.
JJJJJerome Ellis recently presented a solo exhibition, Selected Works 2021-2023, at Prosopopoeia (Vienna, 2024), following Loops of Retreat at Sweet Pass Sculpture Park (Dallas, 2023). They have participated in several major group shows, including the Whitney Biennial (New York, 2024), Smoke & Mirrors at the Zimmerli Art Museum (New Brunswick, 2024), Fugitive Speech at Oklahoma Contemporary (2023), Tongues of Fire at Ballroom Marfa (2023), Voicings at Artspace Hew Haven (2023), Choralités at Maison Populaire (Montreuil, 2023), the Typojanchi International Typography Biennial (Seoul, 2023) and landscape hot mic at Juf (Madrid, 2023). This year he is presenting his works in eye below ear at the Kunsthal Mechelen in Belgium, in In a Manner of Speaking at The Blackwood in Toronto and several solo exhibitions including Edge Effect at the Elizabeth River Project in Norfolk, VA from January 30 to December 2025. JJJJJerome Ellis, Photo © Annie Forrest |
