In the 1970s, a prolonged economic recession in New York City ironically gave rise to an avant-garde artistic renaissance in downtown Manhattan, as dozens of painters, choreographers, filmmakers, and musicians acquired cheap and voluminous "loft" spaces in SoHo, NoHo, and the East Village. Based on extensive archival research and interviews, this lecture explores the history of the legendary space that was arguably the most significant of the early jazz lofts, Ornette Coleman's Artist House. 

Brent Hayes Edwards is the Peng Family Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he is also affiliated with the Center for Jazz Studies. His most recent books are Écrire le monde noir (Rot-Bo-Krik, 2024), a volume of the collected interwar writings of the pioneering Martinican intellectual Paulette Nardal, which Edwards co-edited with Eve Gianoncelli; and Easily Slip into Another World: A Life in Music (Knopf, 2023), the co-written autobiography of the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Henry Threadgill, which won the ASCAP Foundation Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Book Award in Pop Music and the American Book Award.