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13TEENTH FL. — A Space Made by Playing channels the energy of Lower Manhattan’s mid-20th century residential artist lofts, where the cultural avant garde lived, created, and cultivated community in an era of disinvestment and urban flight. The Gallatin Galleries now serve as a temporary holding space for sounds, images, colors and textures that evoke Black, Caribbean, Latine/Latinx, immigrant, and bohemian New York City social geographies, the mythical and coveted loft space blurring our sense of place and time.
Conceived by and drawing on the lived experience of musician and Gallatin professor Kwami Coleman, this installation invites visitors to enter the gallery and explore. Upon removing or covering their shoes, guests are welcome to engage with objects, images, video, and recorded audio, and to attend a pair of live musical performances, on February 8 and 22, 2023. Throughout the month, additional musical happenings by and for the denizens of 13TEENTH FL. are planned, allowing the community to inhabit and enjoy the gallery as a home for creative thought and action.
Our loft is organized into two distinct spaces; the apartment and the shrine, the former flowing into the latter. The apartment reduces the industrial scale of the gallery to a personal size, much as residents of disused warehouses and factories converted working spaces into living spaces. We ask that you let yourself in, both physically and spiritually, and immerse yourself into this home space—look, watch, listen, and contemplate the layered mixed media on comfortable cushions and pillows. The shrine is where the band plays at designated times; it also holds instruments invited guests will use to explore sound, providing opportunities to create music collaboratively with visitors.
Like the artist lofts that inspire it, 13TEENTH FL. is an exercise in proactive cultural place-making within (and against) the grind of industry in lower Manhattan; once mechanical, now commercial and informational. It exists to generate, house, and encourage organic, creative thinking and activity. By playing—with sound, form, shape, and color—we create space: for the ancestors, people of the present, and the sublime spirit of our collective and cooperative future.
come hang. this is a space.
it’s my home. it’s your home.
we divine through music.
13TEENTH FL. is a living performance space. it is a home for [____]. take off your shoes once inside; enter a (!) world.
visitors are invited to explore its three distinct environments: the foyer, the lounge, and the shrine. connecting them is a hallway. people live here. music lives here.
the lounge is where you go to astral travel into your imagination. there are images (still and moving) and recorded sounds for you to engage with.
the shrine is where the spirits live and are ritually. summoned. the instruments are their vessels. they will be. conjured twice a day, on wednesdays and fridays. sound is spirit.
the foyer is the portal.
once upon a time, there were more places like this.
here for the people. for the ancestors. for our collective future.
àṣẹ.
– 13TEENTH FL.
—Kwami Coleman
Kwami Coleman is a musician, composer, producer, and musicologist specializing in improvised music. His research and published work are focused on experimental music history, jazz history, Black music and the African Diaspora, the political economy of music, music technology, aesthetics, and cultural studies. Kwami’s first recording as a bandleader, Local Music, was released in 2017. It features ten original pieces, some of which are molded around field recordings taken around his childhood home in Harlem. His forthcoming book, Change: Modern Jazz and the “New Thing,” is a short history of the jazz avant-garde of the 1960s. He is an assistant professor of music at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University.
Accompanying Sextet Members: Myron Walden, winds, Alicyn Yaffee, guitar, Vicente Archer, bass, Shakoor Hakeem, percussion, X., drums