JJJJJerome Ellis

Opening in November 2026, Index is pleased to present a solo exhibition by JJJJJerome Ellis, a Grenadian-Jamaican-American artist, musician and person who stutters. Through music, performance, writing, video, and photography, Ellis asks what stuttering can teach us about listening, generosity, and justice. In their practice, JJJJJerome uses sound, writing, and improvisation to render dysfluency – a self-coined term to describe their stutter – not as a deficit, but as a modality of time that resists the violence of normative fluency and capitalist temporalities.

The exhibition at Index features a newly produced work – a spatial and visual transfiguration of archival newspaper material to produce a page–a–day calendar within Index’ space. The work is based on newspaper material that documents Black fugitivity. Specifically, the archival material entails the collation of newspaper advertisements for the recapture of enslaved people – in JJJJJerome’s words, enslaved elders – who achieved liberation from those who claimed ownership of them.