JJJJJerome Ellis

“Something [my mother] taught me was that verse in the New Testament: ‘Pray without ceasing,’ and I really hold on to that verse. It’s a guiding principle for me because that’s how I see this calendar. I can always say a prayer or think of an ancestor honorably, no matter what day it is.” (JJJJJerome Ellis in conversation with Christine Sun Kim, in the book accompanying the exhibition)

JJJJJerome Ellis, of Grenadian-Jamaican-American heritage, works in multimedia art, music, composition, poetry, and performance. His artistic practice explores the intersections of Blackness, music, spirituality, and non-normative language, creating spaces for healing and community. For this exhibition, Ellis has covered the walls with a calendar that extends with one page for each day and month throughout the exhibition’s duration. Lists executed in charcoal, adorned with flowers drawn in oil pastel, record the names of enslaved people who freed themselves in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, along with the dates and locations of their escapes. An audio recording is heard in the room, where Ellis’s voice describes the installation and reads out the names associated with each day. Since the exhibition space on the 1st floor is not accessible by elevator, copies of the pages are provided for visitors to touch and examine up close.

Every day of the year marks numerous escapes from slavery. In this continuous cycle of anniversaries, commemoration itself becomes an unending process: a ceremony that can be performed at any time. The work’s day-specific structure has a personal origin. In Ellis’s childhood, his mother read from Our Daily Bread, a devotional book with excerpts from the Old and New Testaments and a reflection for each day. This daily ritual deeply shaped Ellis. The installation is also inspired by two very different places: Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial, whose dimensions are determined by the assembly of a seemingly unmanageable number of names, and the Chapelle du Rosaire de Vence, also known as the Matisse Chapel, with its combination of solemnity and childlike play. In Ellis’s installation, the seriousness of the subject meets the lightness of the materials. The paper sheets, held only by magnets at their two upper corners, move slightly in the draft caused by visitors’ movements in the room.

The project grew out of research initiated by Ellis’s first encounter with so-called “runaway slave” advertisements in 2020. These notices, published by slaveholders in newspapers, named the escapees, described their appearance, and stated the rewards offered for their capture. Ellis began to examine these deeply ambivalent documents — testimonies to extreme violence that simultaneously speak of resistance against the system that produced them — in databases and newspaper archives in the United States, Great Britain, Haiti, Jamaica, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Grenada, Barbados, St. Thomas, Trinidad, Canada, Portugal, and Brazil. Ellis understands the people mentioned in them as ancestors: spiritual forebears with whom an “ancestral practice” creates a connection.

The two preceding projects that led to this exhibition were closely related to Ellis’s exploration of speech disorders. Ellis speaks with a tonic stutter, which manifests as silences. Instead of accepting the pathologizing of these silences as a burden, Ellis calls them “clearings,” which, like music, can open up time and create the possibility of interruption. Silence challenges normative expectations of speech, communication, and the efficient use of time, allowing speakers and listeners to enter into an experience of shared intimacy. Ellis’s entire body of work rethinks stuttering and hesitations as forms of expression, relationship, and prayer — as elements of a lifelong ritual.

In a track on his debut album The Clearing (2021), Ellis sings the names of escaped people described as stuttering in historical documents. The transdisciplinary project Aster of Ceremonies (2023), consisting of poems, essays, musical scores, chants, and hymns, connects two archives: wanted ads for ancestors with speech impediments and The Flora of North America. In a devotional song cycle, the work portrays the experiences of people escaping slavery and their relationship to nature. Figures emerge whom Ellis calls “plant elders.” Speculatively, the work designs the sensory and material worlds the fugitives encountered: the landscapes they traversed and the plants that may have offered them food, shelter, or protection. In this way, Ellis relates the stories of the ancestors to the more-than-human world.

While the machinery of slavery operated on a gigantic scale, degrading people to anonymous objects and categorizing them with brutally dehumanizing terms, Ellis’s work attempts to redirect attention to the individuals named in these documents. Ellis’s Calendar creates a different sense of time. The daily act of reflecting on the escaped people offers an opportunity for remembrance that differs from the obligations and appointments usually noted in a calendar. To create a calendar is, in a way, to write history for the future. In engaging with a different calendar, a different history — and a different experience of time — emerges.