This issue ignites Jupiter's first foray into the realm of the built environment as a subject and site of study. Throughout Issue 008, contributors seek to fill a gap in architectural discourse by drawing connections between significant architectural sites and the modes of sociality and cultural production that emerge from them, like, for instance, how the altar of Detroit’s New Bethel Church served as the incubator for Aretha Franklin's musical career. While Issue 008 both venerates and critiques Black space, it also cites modernism's dependence on Black aesthetic, theoretical, and metaphysical contributions by developing longform writing and an associated free public program (in collaboration with Roland Knowlden) that parses out the relationship between Gwendolyn Brooks, Chicago’s iconic Mecca Flats, and Mies van der Rohe's Crown Hall. Ultimately, this is an interdisciplinary venture that seeks to suture together the reader’s relationships with pop and contemporary culture to the built environment by considering how architectural sites that beget Black assembly and gathering prompt the innovation of forms like music, literature, and visual art.

Camille Bacon is a Chicago-based writer and the editor-in-chief of Jupiter Magazine. She is building a “sweet Black writing life” as inspired by the words of poet Nikky Finney and the infinite wisdom of the Black feminist tradition. Through a methodology that straddles rigorous research and divinely derived oration, she excavates how aesthetics can catalyze a collective reorientation towards relation, connection and intimacy and away from apathy and amnesia. Ultimately, her work serves as the external embodiment of her commitment to amplifying the wayward ingenuity of the Black creative spirit. Bacon’s work has appeared in i-D Magazine, Frieze, Studio Magazine, Momus, and Burnaway, among other outlets. She manages McArthur Binion’s studio in Chicago and formerly held positions at GRAY Gallery, Chicago, and The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York. She is a graduate of Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts, where she studied chemistry and Africana studies.

Jupiter Magazine, founded in 2024, is committed to creating editorial conditions that support more viable writing lives by exceeding current industry standards of compensation, prioritizing a slow writing and editing tempo, and foregrounding a trans-disciplinary approach to art writing and cultural criticism. Since its founding, Jupiter has not only published issues but also hosted free public programs in Chicago, New York, Detroit, and Los Angeles. The publication seeks to embody the fact that art is a functional tool that assists us in asking and answering existential questions about the nature and stakes of being alive today. Jupiter acknowledges that art is a medicinal force, an antidote to apathy, a remedy for interpersonal separation, and an offering against amnesia; thus, we also know that art writing extends the healing potentiality of art itself. The magazine is dedicated to providing its readers with language that expands their own sense of agency around their personal development such that they relate to themselves as people who are invested in not just witnessing the world shifting around them but being active architects of the world they wish to inhabit. Jupiter’s ethos is grounded in the Black feminist tradition, seeks to aid, abet and fuel the ongoing project of liberation and contributes to the chorus of anti-coloniality by readdressing the perennial question of the artist’s role in global freedom struggles.