The Color Factory
What is it: Founded by Jordan Ferney of Oh Happy Day with fellow creatives and artists as a temporary participatory exhibition in San Francisco, The Color Factory now takes the form of two locations in NYC and Houston that capture each cities unique color stories.
Why you’ll love it: Yes, experiential museums have gotten some flack for their Insta-heavy ways, but we like how The Color Factory works with local artists, illustrators, designers, and makers to envisage its color-loving environments: like our favorite Christine Wong Yap, whose Complementary Compliments room invites visitors to sit across from one another, Emmanuelle Moureaux’s colorful paper ribbon ceilings and Carnovsky’s perspective-shifting NYC corridor. Also, note the jet black ice cream available to try.
What you need to know: Is sitting in a ball pit allowed anymore? Is it ok for rainbow confetti to sprinkle down on you? Can you really draw with giant markers on the wall or boogie on a giant light-up dance floor? Apparently yes you can. After months of being closed (and maybe even again), The Color Factory has brought in some serious cleaning techniques – just note how they clean those plastic balls. One reminder: wear a mask for those selfies.
How to bring this into your life wherever you are: You can extend your visit to The Colour Factory by following a neighborhood map to seek out more colors, and we’d suggest creating something similar where you are. Which colors can you see in your immediate environment? How often do they occur? Can you create the color palette of your home, your street, whatever your world geographically consists of? Photograph the different shades, sketch them, paint them out, even arrange them in a print. We’re inspired by the work of Leah Rosenberg, one of the founding Color Factory artists and eternal explorer of color.
Why we think it still matters: Anyone else longing for joy? For play, for escapism, for (can we whisper it here) fun? At a moment when many of us are fatigued or despondent or a little bit lost, that spirit of play that before felt frivolous in its Insta-centric approach now feels like a much-needed respite from the world. And maybe it's needed now in a not just a running-away-from-it-all-through-mirrored-ceiling-rooms way, but in a physiological sense: when we find the joy in our lives, we benefit from a release of happy hormones dopamine and serotonin. Though the impact of specific colors is changeable depending on culture (white = calm here, = mourning over there, for instance) and their specific mental health effects unproven, finding small gestures of joy in our days can contribute to an overall sense of happiness.
It may have felt like the color has drained out of our lives recently and we’re all existing in that sluggish brown that is created when kids mix all the colors together, but somewhere like The Colour Factory can remind us of the rainbow they were hoping to create when they did that.
In their own words: ‘Color Factory embraces child-like imagination, while expanding boundaries of perception and understanding.’
