Color Factory


Color Factory is a pop-up interactive art exhibition with brightly colored room-sized installations, each themed around the concept of color. It ran for eight and a half months in 2017 in San Francisco, and is currently running in New York City and Houston.
Color Factory has commonly been cited as part of a trend of “Instagram museums”, temporary art exhibitions catered towards younger millennial audiences which are designed to be photographed and shared on Instagram and other social media. Co-founder Jordan Ferney has publicly pushed back against descriptions of Color Factory as an Instagram museum, stating that her goal “had always been to make something that was beautiful to experience, not photograph”.
Artists whose works have been featured in Color Factory include Jason Polan, Lakwena Maciver, Molly Young, Tosha Stimage, and Tom Stayte. Exhibits include ballpits, balloon-filled rooms, and illuminated dance floors, with cameras preinstalled throughout the exhibition for photography.

History

Color Factory was founded in August 2017 by event-planner/blogger Jordan Ferney, artist Leah Rosenberg, and designer Erin Jang. It originally debuted as a one-month, 15-installation, 12,000 ft2 exhibition in San Francisco, sponsored by Alaskan Airlines and Method Soap. Due to its popularity, this San Francisco run was later extended to last for a total of eight and a half months.
In June and July 2018, Color Factory partnered with the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York City to exhibit the “Manhattan Color Walk”, an outdoor art installation which painted the ground with several stripes of colors, each sampled from a different street of Manhattan.
In August 2018, Color Factory reopened as a temporary 16-installation, 20,000 ft2 standalone exhibition in New York City's SoHo neighborhood, sponsored by Maybelline and Gymboree.