Between the release of a new short film and evolving Jupiter Magazine, her cultivating a “sweet Black writing life” means seducing audiences along the way. Words by Arimeta Diop.
In critic Doreen St. Félix’s dive through the “lush pain music” of Marcus Brown, the artist known as Nourished By Time, she situates the aural experience of the thirty-year-old crooner alongside the likes of Nate Dogg in wit, the serenade of Jodeci, or Keith Sweat if only he just had a bit more play to him. St. Félix admits then she hasn’t seen the artist live, and for that is “eager to see how he makes and inhabits a temporary world, given how much theatre and performance are already embedded in his singing.”
“Doreen’s pen has never led me astray,” Camille Gallogly Bacon explains over a video call in October. “Whenever Doreen says ‘Here, point your attention here,’ I will always do it and literally have never not been delighted by what I find there.” The writer and co-Editor-in-Chief of Jupiter Magazine, which counts St. Félix among its contributors, is home in Chicago. A Taurus who delights in her space, this is the ideal setting to find her: nestled at her desk, the room dotted over with proof of “Midwestern interdependence.” An original 1970s cantilever chair for instance, a Facebook marketplace discovery by her partner that a friend later drove up for her from Detroit, with more touches in store as she continues fashioning the space “to bear in very material form the kind of beauty that I want to live alongside.” A design ethos that reflects a greater lived sensibility—archival and charged with communal connection.
Speaking of a writer like Bacon begets an exercise in citation. This is by design. With her comes the aforementioned St. Felix, Sobonfu Somé, Madeline Hunt-Ehrlich, Jennifer Declue, her professor at Smith College. We repeatedly intone, alongside, throughout our conversations. “Our movements have suffered because we have this obsession with a hero’s journey; with heroes in general and idolatry,” Bacon says. “That’s something I actively try to work against. When you think of the work that I’m doing, you always are going to think of the people that I made it with because I’m going to continue to invoke their names whenever I can.” Here is not the writer as recluse aesthete off in the cabin alone mining their own genius, instead the writer is co-conspirator and community member thoroughly, a homie.
Her dedication to treasures uncovered by those among her circle is what led her to that moment witnessing Nourished By Time’s beguiling flailing from the Lincoln Hall balcony, a venue she’s frequented since her teens. “He tapped the loose nerve endings of anguish, euphoria, and the shimmering sensations that lie between the two with such precision.” Bacon reveals of the performance, slipping into the generous curiosity which marks her criticism in real time. “I’m trying to understand the technology of how he mesmerized me and how his music has mesmerized me since.” Not least because Nourished By Time seems to fit into the Black avant-garde by Bacon’s estimate, a designation she then leans on Fred Moten in pointing out how the term is made oxymoronic by a society who cannot reconcile Blackness with experimental innovation. “In reality the Black and the avant-garde have always been cousins, if not siblings, if not twins,” Bacon asserts. “We have always been the ones who are warping and bending things into a shape that actually defies categorization.” Taking it another step, she continues, “The rigorous and the glamorous are also twins, and it’s Black women’s embodiment and consciousness that has always held those things as true together.”
Alongside fellow writer Daria Simone Harper, Bacon co-founded Jupiter Magazine in January 2024. Bacon describes writers as “an endangered species.” “Writers are going extinct in this very, very distinct way,” she told Office Magazine last year, speaking to a deficient ecosystem for the particular creature—depreciated social status, lacking pay, and ever-shortening turnaround expectations to compete with the sloppy deluge of digital content churn. Since, Bacon and Harper have ventured to create “ecstatic editorial conditions” in Jupiter that have brought together the likes of author Akwaeke Emezi, multi-dimensional cultural worker J Wortham on the operatic capacity for Black imaginary, poet Hanif Abdurraqib, scholar Imani Perry’s cosmic journey through “Lorna’s blues;” Legacy Russell, executive director and chief curator of The Kitchen, was among the first contributors under the title. Over the course of five issues, each with expansive thematic umbrellas: 001: Worldbending, 002: Quantum, 003: The Theater of Refusal, 004: Of Prophecy, 005: Diss Tracks. Jupiter is set to launch a guest editor program with poet Kara Jackson helming the first edition this fall. Writers for the magazine have landed in an arena for stretching, expanding, experimenting or concentrating their practice down to its bare atoms all in pursuit of revealing what is living in the muck among us.
It’s natural then to look to the screen as the next phase for this experiment. Under the title Jupiter TV, this latest pursuit will launch January 28th, with four episodes documenting an informal critical dialogue on films including BLKNWS by Kahlil Joseph, The Ballad of Suzanne Cesaire by Madeleine Hunt Ehrlich, Siméon by Euzhan Palcy, and Losing Ground by Kathleen Collins. “The idea is that we’re peeling the criticism off the page, giving it to people in a more glamorous form: on the screen that might coax them in the door and get them to stay.” Then spring brings a second season release with four more episodes on Chicago public artworks: the Lorraine Hansberry monument by Alison Saar and the Ida B. Wells monument by Richard Hunt among them. The new venture will then continue in a biannual format for free, no ads. “Everyone is like, the page is obsolete,” Bacon says. “No one’s reading art criticism. So then we might as well give it to people in a form they have nostalgia for, which is the YouTube DIY, ‘This is how I did my makeup,’ or the skater video, which is kind of how we’ve edited them. People know that form. People don’t know the Clement Greenberg form—that’s not a common form. And it’s not exciting to me.”
Bacon’s most recent project alongside co-directors josh brainin and Youssef Boucetta, is the film It’s Just A Fucking Opening which premiered at the 2025 Chicago International Film Festival. At an 18-minute runtime the intimate dissection of the social theatre of a gallery opening for a young Black, emerging artist, is pointedly claustrophobic and familiar from onset. We the viewer never actually witness the performance piece by the lead Anisa (Ireon Roach) only the ensuing ad hoc critique reminiscent of the eagerness, online and among peers, to make the hottest, quickest take possible with little time for sincere rumination. The film is prefaced by a quote from Toni Morrison, lifted from her 1979 Barnard College commencement address, “I am suggesting that we pay as much attention to our nurturing sensibilities as to our ambition.” (The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago will be hosting a screening curated by Jupiter borrowing its titling and premise from the address on January 20). In that way the film also limns how we fail to abide by those words, succumbing to structures particularly Black artists are primed to sacrifice for, ourselves and those around us, seeking fleeting favour. “It’s basically the scenario where you need your friend to show up as your friend and not as your curator,” Bacon details. “We wanted to dig into the way aspiring to things alongside other people can also just be really complicated. We’re talking about jealousy, we’re talking about envy. We’re talking about what it means to feel like you’re in competition with people you really love.” The familiarity comes not only from the premise but in realities not at all far from the screen. Director josh brainin originally let Bacon know the project was in part based on her life as he’d observed her career develop. The unveiling dread after dread, like a slow creeping horror film reveal, which propels the film is therefore more grounded and its respective lesson cogent.
“Doing this taught me criticism is a fundamentally polyvocal act,” Bacon says of making the film. “It’s a chorus. So if it’s a polyvocal act, why is the predominant form of this thing still one author’s name on the page?”
“It’s the work and the spirit of the work that’s going to dictate to me what I need to do and where I need to be in order to open the passageway for the thing to be built. If I’m imagining all the things that I make as an entity, then there’s the spirit of intimacy between the two of us too, and it’s that spirit of intimacy that gives me the feeling of: ‘Okay, green flag, we’re going to do this.’” That her father, a Chicago-native and her mother being from Martinique, each local boasting a depth of political histories from the writings of the Césaires to the Midwest seat of Black political activism, lend the rhythm and basis to her philosophies in equal measure. Perhaps due in another part because she and her family left Chicago when Bacon was eight years old to Sligo, Ireland for six years, Mumbai, India for three years before returning to the U.S. for her senior year of high school, Bacon was able to sidestep the psychic trap of deeply internalising American individualism. Or perhaps because she is an eldest sister. Regardless, she reiterates this sense of dedication to others in another instance at a viewing of the satirical comedy Putney Swope (1969) hosted by Sebastien Pierre at a wine bar in Flatbush, Brooklyn in November. Bacon flits about the space, a reembodiment of her character Inés from It’s Just A Fucking Opening, her white feathered getup swapped now for a floor dusting black overcoat and billowing black pants that trick the eye into seeing a gown. The chill and professional striving of her performance is replaced irl by the bright eagerness of a comrade. “A good litmus test for your integrity begins by defining who your primary audience is,” Bacon works out during a group discourse responding to the screening. “I don’t think audience always has to mean everyone who encounters your work, I think you can be making things for a very particular subset of people.”
To some degree Bacon is not too concerned with defining “what” or “who” is the critic so much as she is invested in where criticism happens—where it happens begets the audience. Where the audience demands here, here it happens. And the audience of our generation is before the screen, so there she posits criticism should go as well. It’s Just A Fucking Opening is therefore a film and formal exercise. When Jupiter makes its onscreen debut that will similarly be an effort at remixing the form, pushing at prescribed boundaries. The page is not wholly rejected, forgotten or forsaken. The short film’s accompanying zine wrapped in a proscenium red aptly called “Jupiter” printed in collaboration with John Andrews at Robert Blackburn Print Workshop extends the project’s ethos full circle returning the viewer to the page, the drawing board literally in one instance with the inclusion of an annotated bibliography alongside cast interviews, essays and on set ephemera. The typeface for the film poster, reproduced here, is cut through and jarred and interrupted at one point running off the page imaging a core tension. The screen may seduce but the page slows us to meditate to consider and in order to accomplish what Bacon and her collaborators appear to set out to do, both are needed.
In her book Millennial Style, Professor Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman puts it thus, “I turned to the cultural producers, the writers, the visual artists, the beauty-makers, the transformers of and within the African diaspora and—with all of the language available to me and every bit of critical capacity brought to bear—I pleaded, “What’s next? What now?” And they answered.” The resounding answer in this instance calls out old scripts of what success is. What good is ambition to ascension if we destroy in order to achieve it? The Financial Times in early 2025 declared the end to an age of empire as young gallerists coming up today meant to inherit the throne instead reject visions of the multi-national behemoths generations prior built up. Yesterday’s success just isn’t sexy. It makes more of a life to ensure the survival of the whole community than isolate from it and pass down decree from on high. And that may be something of the writer-critic Bacon and the greater universe of her making falls in line with. Criticism is a seduction as she tells it, drawing audiences into a belief in the far out worlds the art and work we turn our gaze towards, an interplay of revealing and obstructing sight. Because this life is scary and growing ever stranger, why go it alone when you could gather up the homies and weather the storms in each other’s arms.
