whitney billboard

What does it mean to ‘create time’? Stuttering can open up space—and time—to find reflection, possibility and potential in repetitions, prolongations and pauses, making room for deep listening and connection.

As the collective People Who Stutter Create, we mobilised the Whitney’s exhibition billboard as a place to publicly celebrate the transformational space of dysfluency, a term that can encompass stuttering/stammering and other communication differences such as aphasia, Tourette’s, and dysarthria.

The design is inspired by the work of Jenny Holzer and Alisha B. Wormsley. Both have used striking statements in their work along with typographic simplicity. We used the typeface Dysfluent Mono, which emulates or represents stuttering in typographic form.

The lowercase typography is intentional: we wanted the statements feeling warm, welcoming, accessible and familiar, like a text from a friend. We used the green background colour to give a quality of warmth that stark black and white may not be able to provide. Green has long been used in the stuttering community worldwide as a point of representation.

In I wanna be with you everywhere’s (IWBWYE) own words, it is “a celebration of nonlocality, roaming, peripatetic (traveling) passions. It’s a stranded, stuck, slowed, stop-time love scene. 2024’s Summer Solstice launches our upcoming K/Crip School pilot with deepened invocations from kin and collectives. Our study is the get together. There won’t really be an end as this is actually just the beginning (again), third round around, encore before—in continual rehearsal.”

People Who Stutter Create (PWSC) performed for the first time publicly at the Summer Solstice event. JJJJJerome Ellis led the collective with a combination of song, music and poetry. Conor Foran followed with a debut poetry performance: he repeated ‘I’ for a few minutes as a callback to an early stammering experience. Kristel Kubart, Delicia Daniels and Jia Bin joined on Zoom, and each performed poetry and read a passage of text about their personal experiences of stammering. PWSC was grateful to be part of this hybrid event that celebrated disability through art in an accessible, multi-realm space.

Celebrating Stuttering Voices featured readings and conversation by People Who Stutter Create (PWSC) collective—JJJJJerome Ellis, Jia Bin, Delicia Daniels, Conor Foran, and Kristel Kubart—interspersed with occasional musical interludes by Ellis. Through repeated sounds, prolonged sounds, and blocks with no sound, PWSC aims to describe and transform social reality. Celebrating Stuttering Voices will offer an intimate opportunity to create room for deep listening, understanding, and collaboration.