Alexandria Smith: The Three Graces

Alexandria Smith was seated at her dining room table when a copy of June Jordan's _Directed By Desire_ (2005) arose from its slumber on an adjacent bookcase, sprouted wings, soared off the shelf, and landed squarely on her shoulder. "I believe in spirits and ghosts… June definitely knocked the book off the shelf," she remembers, and so begins the origin story of _The Three Graces_ (2026), a research-based drawing I commissioned Smith to compose for [_Jupiter Issue 007: Architecture_](https://www.jupiter-mag.com/magazine/issue-7/cover). This moment of literary levitation reminded her of an [Instagram post](https://www.instagram.com/p/B9ceMGxJfiY/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link) shared by fellow artist Simone Leigh about _Skyrise for Harlem:_ an architectural intervention Jordan envisioned alongside R. Buckminster Fuller. In 1964, Jordan was commissioned by _Esquire_ magazine to write an article about the revolt that erupted in Harlem following the police murder of fifteen year old James Powell. [As noted by Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts](https://www.thenation.com/article/society/harlem-is201-june-jordan/), "rather than explain any of that, Jordan responded with a dream. She proposed a collaboration with the architect R. Buckminster Fuller: a radical/visionary redesign of Harlem to create an environment where such events were not possible." Though the project never came to fruition, it has supplied ample speculation-fuel for those who wish to think alongside and reshape Harlem's built environment, as Smith enacts with _The Three Graces_. In an effort to physically embed the drawing within the architectural landscape that Jordan was so intent on reimagining, the work will be on view from September 13 through November 15, 2026 in the window of Long Gallery Harlem, which overlooks Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard. – _Camille Bacon (Editor-in-Chief, Jupiter Magazine)_