Co-editors of Jupiter Magazine, Camille Bacon, a Chicago-based writer, and Daria Simone Harper, a multimedia journalist in Brooklyn recount their first interactions to create their publication. Over a Zoom call, Bacon says the idea stemmed from a desire to nurture and extend their inner practices but to also do so for writers simultaneously. Last January, the duo met for their first meal together in Chelsea, under the guise of getting to know each other. Both having illustrious careers in the art and writing industries, Daria left an imprint on David Zwirner where she worked as an editor and Camille lent her writing prowess to publications such as The New York Times and i-D. They bonded over shared desires and frustration with the current state of art writing. “We are hoping to show up for each other and think about healing in a very real [and] cosmic way, and both of us believe deeply in the power of art and our relationship to art,” Daria elaborates. Camille adds: “Writers are an endangered species, and we are here to nourish that ecology. We are here to shift industry standards. We are here to renew a collective sense of romance and deep value around what writers do.”
Laying with the publication’s manifesto is a call for “linguistic atmosphere that is rooted in spirit, regards and reveres the legitimacy of divinely-derived knowledge, and functions as a mode of cosmic Catharsis.” Its birth has a mystical presence, drawing from “the perennial question of artist’s roles in global freedom struggles,” grounding its text in a circular practice. Jupiter looks back as it reaches forward.
Issue 1: Worldbending debuted on January 18 with the following inaugural contributors who are also lauded writers: Akwaeke Emezi, J Wortham, Rianna Jade Parker, Joshua Segun-Lean, and Diallo Simon-Ponte. Jupiter will launch four online issues and one annual print edition. This intentional approach allocates the select writers a deliberately agreeable time frame to sit with their subjects whilst offering them space to execute their written works. With these core principles in addition to a trans-disciplinary approach, the co-founders are aiming to create a refreshing format for art criticism and also cultural criticism.
Below is an in-depth conversation with the co-founders and co-editors of Jupiter Magazine, Camille Bacon and Daria Simone Harper which spans the presence of the art critic, the role of the writer as a laborer, and the magazine’s lineage within the Black editorial canon.
ESSENCE.com: How did you come up with the name for Jupiter?
Camille Bacon: We had our Poetry Foundation panel during the Expo Chicago and Daria and I on stage with our dearest, Jessica Lynne and Amarie Gipson, announced officially that we were doing this. For several days, I was just receiving intense transmissions during my dreams and would wake up at three in the morning [and] the word Jupiter kept spinning in my head. I wrote it down in one of our documents and went back to sleep, and woke up the next morning, and sort of recalled that to Daria. I think the whole time [I’ve] been acknowledging the first law of thermodynamics: you can’t create or destroy energy, it only recycles itself and shapes shifts, and morphs.
That also means that when we speak about ancestral divination [and] when we speak about the presence of spirits. When we speak about this reliance on the unseen. To give you the information and the language you need exactly when you need it. We’re very serious about that. Through that mutual understanding, I regarded that we were not going to look for a name, that the name for this thing would insist upon itself somehow, and that I think we both just trusted that we would listen intently enough to catch it when it arrived or really to hold it when it arrived.
Jupiter is the planet of abundance, expansion, and good fortune, and we know that names are a way of conjuring and material reality, that a name is a spell and a name is a magical incantation. And so, as Daria has been noticing and mentioning recently, each time someone says Jupiter, it’s aiding and abetting, and fusing more energy into the lifespan of this entity. So that just made all the sense in the world that the name would be a spell of good fortune, abundance, and expansion.
ESSENCE.com: With your publication’s emphasis on criticism, what is the role of the critic?
Daria Simone Harper: We hope to foster relationships and space for critics who are operating from a position of care and thinking about the way that the critic is engaging with whatever work [is] at hand, but really from a place of intention to extend.
The word itself has taken on such a negative connotation for so many people, and I think that there are so many factors that may be a bit warranted, but I do think that somewhere along the way it’s been forgotten. The critics that we’re working with are ultimately so deeply invested in the ability to constantly make new meaning of and to challenge and to ask questions in a way that ultimately will reveal things in a very generative way.
CB: I always imagine that critics are not on the periphery looking in. They’re critiquing or writing about in this ivory tower, regarded as this authoritarian figure to make a value judgment but rather the critic, as deep in the crevices of this broader ecosystem that we traffic through. And I think it goes back to what Daria was saying about really regarding the act of criticism, at least as we consider it as an act of care. Lowery Sims said that the root of the word to curate is to care, and people love to talk about what that etymology means. I feel that, that is what Daria and I strive to embody and strive to impart on everyone that we work with through Jupiter.
There’s a reason writers are paid, maybe 10% of what the artists they’re writing about received as compensation for the work that they’re writing about, and the system tells you how much it values your work, based on how much it pays you, right as it is currently situated right now. And we’re interested in both materially, metaphysically, and metaphorically bringing the role of writers right into the central node of that circle. Our North star, Jessica Lynne, wrote a fabulous essay called “Criticism is not Static.” In it, she writes about the role of criticism, the role of writing as being this act of and gesture of placing care around the practices of the artists.
ESSENCE.com: What are you discussing regarding the inequitable compensation of writers in terms of equating the writer to type of laborer?
DSH: Camille and I talk about [this] a lot. There is a mysticism around the writer in a lot of ways, and across the industry where there can be a form of distance that people sense, or just kind of like a general lack of knowledge. One thing that Camille you’ve said before, which I love is when you ask somebody to conjure up an image of an artist’s studio. A lot of people will have this vignette that they can picture. But when it comes to thinking about what that looks like for a writer, it’s not necessarily the same. There’s not necessarily the same feeling. The publication that we wish we could have written for and been editors for, but also thinking about our network and community of peers who are also writers. I think that there’s something very important about existing outside of isolation as a writer.
CB: This publication is a direct response to that alienation, a refusal of that alienation, and a grand experiment in how we might be able to really cement conditions again, both ideologically and materially speaking, that make writing lives more viable, partially through an understanding of why the work we do is so important and valuable.
ESSENCE.com: I was just thinking about the Black media landscape, do you see Jupiter fitting into that lineage?
CB: We talk about legacy and lineage all the time, specifically citational ethics. I’d say we’re a direct descendant of Taylor Renee Aldridge, and Jessica Lynn’s publication, Arts.Black, which was the first publication dedicated to Black art critics and they started it a decade ago. I definitely feel like we are in lineage with and as we mentioned just earlier, of course, but I also think about the ways that Ebony and Jet are particularly sticky to think about because they do serve as this locus for in articulation of a specific Black consumer. I think we are interested in a more avant-garde approach. Something more akin to the rebellious and fugitive nature of Just Above Midtown.
In terms of the importance of explicitly naming and affiliation to blackness by naming ourselves as a black publication. This is something Daria and I still go back and forth about in terms of whether or not we will publicly name Jupiter as a Black publication. It is a Black publication. As we are Black women, right? We are not only publishing writing by Black people forever. Our first issues are, and not because we wanted them necessarily explicitly to be Black flattened regard. But because that’s who we look to. That’s who we listen to. That’s who our community is. But I do think that there’s a certain audacity and also explicitly claiming a desire not to be in proximity with whiteness.
DSH: There is something massive that we’re also trying to do, which is examining those threads as well and thinking about global freedom struggles like thinking about where black liberation sits in connection with freedom struggles globally. To have space alongside our folks, who might be from South Asia, and might be from literally everywhere.
I think that naming that lack of proximity or the distancing to whiteness is very essential. The language of the new model is really exciting to look back and think about the publications that have existed that, you know, have laid [the] groundwork for us. Because of the business side of things, these publications often operate under a larger media conglomerate. There’s a certain level of rigidity in the way that things can be presented. In what can be discussed, and what’s off the table, what’s off limits–which is something that we’re committed to breaking beyond as an independent venture.
ESSENCE.com: If you could choose one person dead or alive to write for Jupiter, who would it be?
CB: I already bagged my living one, Akwaeke Emezi. Akwaeke wrote the cover story and I am so geeked! They’re included in the context of art criticism because I feel like their pen be wielded towards any direction.
Toni Morrison needs no introduction nor explanation. Aside from the fact she was also the writer-editor at Penguin Random House responsible for getting Angela Davis and Toni Cade Bambara published, I would love for a retrospective reflection from her on what those particular hyphen modes of playing with language do, and how they feed each other.
Lucille Clifton. I think that if we want to position and lean on this Black feminist notion of the work of building a life as a creative venture, as a creative pursuit, especially as a Black woman. I think that her poems theorized the everyday and the mundane through the lens of the miraculous so profoundly. I’d be so curious to see what she would do with a particular art object in front of her, and how she would read the mundane miraculousness of that art object.
Kathleen Collins! I saw her film Losing Ground recently. I stumbled upon this lecture she gave to students at Howard University in the film department in the ‘80s. She was so deeply invested in exalting and venerating the mundane dimensions of Black folks’ lives. I’d be so fascinated to see what she would do as a practitioner of film and a scriptwriter.
DSH: Octavia Butler. I am drawn to this idea of writers who would not necessarily be labeled an art writer, someone who is not in their, you know, regular practice always engaging with investigating and grappling with art. My interest in fantasy and sci-fi and thinking about this kind of notion around futurity. I wonder what may happen if Octavia Butler was able to contribute to Jupiter.
