FAMILY OUTING
HOUSTON IS REPRESENTED BY 30 UNIQUE COLORS.
Color Factory pop-up could be your new Instagram spot.
Color Factory, an immersive art pop-up that opens in Houston this weekend, is intended to enhance all the senses.
Employing a distinctive color palette organizers chose to represent Space City, throughout the 15 spaces, guests will interact with a clay-brown that’s a nod to Buffalo Bayou, red to represent Viet-Cajun crawfish and cement-gray that’s reflective of artist David Adickes’ presidential heads. Dark green is the color of Central Market’s shopping carts, pink matches the icing on Shipley Do-nuts, and so on.
Color Factory debuted in San Francisco in 2017 as a temporary pop-up that was extended for months due to popularity. There is currently a location in New York.
Co-founder Alison Piepmeyer says Houston’s “priority on artistic endeavors” made it a fit for the first Color Factory in the South. The team worked with local artists, brands and nonprofits to design the 20,000-square-foot experience.
The palette of 30 Houston colors is reflected in Dr. Seuss-style stripes that cover the floors, ceilings and interactive “machinery.” Colorful lights are illuminated in interactive rooms; one feels like you’ve walked inside a giant LiteBrite toy.
The lobby’s large circular art installation was made with 17,000 individually hung pieces of yarn. Nearby, a small Lucy-and-Ethelstyle conveyor belt distributes colorful macarons from Tout Suite.
Guests eat them while registering on iPads to get a token that will later connect them to digital photos of their experience — cameras are rigged from ceilings and hidden in walls.
In the Chromaroma room, Houston-based chief experience officer Tina Malhotra says the team explored the concept of certain smells triggering our memories. Small portholes attached to industrial pipes allow you to smell a colored patch, suggesting what yellow might smell like (popcorn). The scent of blue is a swimming pool.
In the next room, guests pick up 5-foot-tall markers to fill in Houston-inspired coloring-book walls. The pop-art-style drawings include a spaceship, taco, baseball and Art Cars.
Each night the walls are wiped clean for the group art project to begin again the next day.
To score the soundtrack that is specific to each room, the team tapped Mary Ramos, Quentin Tarantino’s music adviser. The ’60s and ’70s set list in the Lite-Brite room, for example, is meant to be “nostalgic,” Malhotra says.
Colorful confetti in the next room floats down from the type of tumblers used on movie sets to create fake snow. As the confetti builds up throughout the day, it gets deep enough to make “snow” angels. Each night, the paper is scooped up to be recycled and dumped again. Here, the treat is popcorn from Dallas-based Make Your Life Sweeter. Green popcorn is margarita-flavored; blue is blueberry cheesecake.
The penultimate room is dubbed Complementary Compliments, which is the “fan favorite” at the New York location, Malhotra says.
A colorful row of phone booths separated by glass partitions reminds one of prison phone booths. Guests are invited to face a friend or, preferably, a stranger and put on headphones. A narrator guides the pair through a drawing exercise.
When they’re finished, the partners swap drawings so each leaves with his portrait, along with a gummy candy.
The grand-finale room is painted in “NASA blue” and celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing. A ball pit holds 500,000 antimicrobial balls that seem to glow due to lighted holes in the floor.
Fiber optic lights dot the ceiling like a planetarium. “It’s supposed to feel like you’re laying on the moon and looking up at the stars,” Malhotra says.
Color Factory worked with Space Center Houston on the space. “They were very excited about our vision,” Piepmeyer says, describing the entity as “equally as passionate about the arts.”
Piepmeyer hopes Color Factory connects people of all ages with art in a meaningful way, especially kids who are “allowed to interact with it,” unlike in a traditional museum setting where, she says, “sometimes I think it’s a little bit hard for kids to grasp.”