Whitney Museum Features JJJJJerome Ellis in Final Performances of 2024 Biennial

Photograph by Cameron Kelly McLeod, courtesy ISSUE Project Room

The final presentations of the 2024 Whitney Biennial performance program will feature musical
compositions by artist JJJJJerome Ellis.

The Whitney Museum of American Art will present Offerings, a new performance by artist JJJJJerome Ellis commissioned for the 2024 Whitney Biennial. Offerings is a series of performances involving sound and text that Ellis will base on the unique musical score they created for the Biennial featuring saxophone, electronics, voice, and hammered dulcimer. In the creation of the musical composition, the artist spent time within the Biennial galleries, responding to the exhibition’s sounds, artworks, spaces, and how visitors engage within the show. The score offers another interpretation of the Biennial and sonic point of entry, and is currently on view in the sixth-floor galleries.

The Offerings performances will take place at the Whitney on Saturday, August 3 at 8 pm and 9:30 pm, and on Sunday, August 4 at 8 pm and 9:30 pm. For the performance, Ellis will lead guests on a musical tour through the galleries highlighting specific artworks featured in the 2024 Whitney Biennial.

An additional performance of Offerings will take place on Friday, August 2 at 7:30 pm during the Whitney’s ongoing Free Friday Nights program that provides free admission to the Museum each Friday from 5–10 pm. This performance takes place outdoors on the fifth-floor terrace and is open to all Museum guests. Although no additional ticket to the August 2 performance is needed, general admission tickets are required, and advance booking is recommended.

Ellis is also founder and creative lead of the collective People Who Stutter Create (with Jia Bin, Delicia Daniels, Conor Foran, and Kristel Kubart). Stuttering Can Create Time, the collective’s contribution to the Biennial, appears on the billboard across the street from the Whitney. Ellis has said the work of scoring the exhibition and the creation of the billboard share the central concern that stuttering can extend, alter, or create time.

Performance Details
Offerings at Free Friday Nights
JJJJJerome Ellis
Friday, August 2, 7:30 pm

Location: Floor 5 T errace
Tickets: This performance is accessible to all Museum guests and does not require an additional ticket. While admission to the Whitney is free on Friday nights, tickets are required, and registering in advance is strongly encouraged.
Event Link: whitney.org/events/offerings2

Offerings
JJJJJerome Ellis
Saturday, August 3, 8 pm, 9:30 pm; Sunday, August 4, 8 pm, 9:30 pm

Location: Floor 6, Lobby
Tickets: Tickets are available online.
Event Link: whitney.org/events/offerings

The weekend of the Offerings performances will be one of the last chances to see Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better Than the Real Thing in its entirety before it closes on Sunday, August 11.

About JJJJJerome Ellis
JJJJJerome Ellis is an artist and person who stutters. Through music, performance, writing, video, and photography, the artist asks what stuttering can teach us about justice. Born in 1989 to Jamaican and Grenadian immigrants, the artist lives in Norfolk, Virginia, with their wife, ecologist-poet Luísa Black Ellis.

About the 2024 Whitney Biennial Performance Program
Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better Than the Real Thing offers a robust performance program of five live events highlighting the work of interdisciplinary artists, composers, choreographers, and musicians. Sound is featured in the Whitney Biennial like never before, both in the galleries and across the performance program. While sight tends to be the dominant sensory experience within museums, this Whitney Biennial performance program offers an alternative approach, forefronting sound and sonic space. Guest curator T aja Cheek worked closely with Biennial curators Meg Onli and Chrissie Iles to develop this performance series, which expands on the 2024 Biennial’s explorations of identity, healing, autonomy, relationships to AI, and more.

The performance program is guest curated by T aja Cheek, who closely collaborated with Whitney Biennial 2024 co-organizers Chrissie Iles, Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Curator, and Meg Onli, Curator at Large. Cheek, also known professionally as L’Rain, is a curator and musician, and currently the Artistic Director of Performance Space New York. She has led performance programs at MoMA PS1 and worked closely with artists to realize projects at institutions like Creative Time, Weeksville Heritage Center, and The High Line. She also co-founded a DIY rehearsal and performance space in her Brooklyn neighborhood that primarily supports independent, improvised, and experimental music.

ABOUT THE WHITNEY

The Whitney Museum of American Art, founded in 1930 by the artist and philanthropist Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (1875–1942), houses the foremost collection of American art from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Mrs. Whitney, an early and ardent supporter of modern American art, nurtured groundbreaking artists when audiences were still largely preoccupied with the Old Masters. From her vision arose the Whitney Museum of American Art, which has been championing the most innovative art of the United States for ninety years. The core of the Whitney’s mission is to collect, preserve, interpret, and exhibit American art of our time and serve a wide variety of audiences in celebration of the complexity and diversity of art and culture in the United States. Through this mission and a steadfast commitment to artists, the Whitney has long been a powerful force in support of modern and contemporary art and continues to help define what is innovative and influential in American art today.

Whitney Museum Land Acknowledgment
The Whitney is located in Lenapehoking, the ancestral homeland of the Lenape. The name Manhattan comes from their word Mannahatta, meaning “island of many hills.” The Museum’s current site is close to land that was a Lenape fishing and planting site called Sapponckanikan(“tobacco field”). The Whitney acknowledges the displacement of this region’s original inhabitants and the Lenape diaspora that exists today.

As a museum of American art in a city with vital and diverse communities of Indigenous people, the Whitney recognizes the historical exclusion of Indigenous artists from its collection and program. The Museum is committed to addressing these erasures and honoring the perspectives of Indigenous artists and communities as we work for a more equitable future. To read more about the Museum’s Land Acknowledgment, visit the Museum’s website.

VISITOR INFORMATION
The Whitney Museum of American Art is located at 99 Gansevoort Street between Washington and West Streets, New York City. Public hours are Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday, 10:30 am–6 pm; Friday, 10:30 am–10 pm; and Saturday and Sunday, 10:30 am–6 pm. Closed Tuesday. Visitors eighteen years and under and Whitney members: FREE. The Museum offers FREE admission and special programming for visitors of all ages every Friday evening from 5–10 pm and on the second Sunday of every month.