Color Factory
If Willy Wonka were more dedicated to making the experience Instagrammable
I’m behind on my museum writing, gang! I went to the Color Factory last week, and you’ll hopefully get my notes on the Cloisters, which I was at yesterday, within the next day or so.
Whenever someone asks me what my favorite color is, I always say “it changes a lot, but right now it’s ____”(right now I would say lavender, but it’s probably most frequently yellow). I like a lot of colors, and every time I see a color in a particularly good context, it’s my favorite color for a little while.
This museum was made for me.
This museum was also made for Instagram and the world of social media at-large. It opened in 2018 amidst something of an ongoing bubble of Post-able destinations— the Museum of Ice Cream(which I will later be attending), the Rosé Mansion, the Bridgerton Experience— each focused less on creating an art space designed to Say Something, and more focused on what would look cool on someone’s feed.
That said, it was an undeniably fun time.
Of course, part of any social media adventure is the being social part, so I invited two Co-Conspirators, my friends Jessie Hamilton and C.Lee to join me.
They had a fun thing set up where you were given a QR code on a notecard at the start of the museum and could scan it at various points to have a machine take your picture and send it to the email that you attached to the QR code. You’ll notice several of those as we go along, including the one below.
The first room we came upon was a room that associated every color with a scent, of varying levels of obscurity from bubblegum to beetroot.
The next room we went through was “complimentary colors” wherein two people sit on either sides of a booth, listening to instructions in their headphones and make art based on the other. Because we were an uneven number Jessie went twice.
Later we found ourselves in a perennially changing room which was of course now done up for the winter holidays.
And from there made our way to a space where we followed a series of questions and answers printed on the floor and walls into separate rooms for each path that told us what our “secret color” was(I’m telling you guys though, so I guess it’s not too much of a secret anymore).
The color wheel room didn’t have too much going on— the wheels didn’t even spin! But I loved how those pictures turned out. Lying on our stomachs is a very flattering angle, as it turns out!
Silent Discos have picked up in the trends recently— the concept is that instead of loud music playing through speakers, everyone is wearing headphones that are all playing the same songs. No noise pollution! No having to shout over the music to your friends— you can just take the headphones off!
The color factory had a silent disco, obviously, and were cranking out the hits of the aughts as hard as they could.
Our final stop was the most famous room of the color factory— the monochrome powder-blue all-ages ball pit. It was extremely cool and very fun and weirdly very comfortable just to lay in for awhile— it really molds to the contours of your body. Jessie Immediately lost their phone and we had to spend some time doing a panicked search but other than that it was great.
I didn’t take as many pictures of this, but there were many free(with the $42 ticket) things to be had along our journey— free bags of jellybeans, free macarons, free stickers.
In the blossoming social media age, it’s not uncommon to wonder how well one might enjoy something that is primarily meant to be interacted with through a screen. Certainly the emphasis on photo opportunities throughout distracted a bit from what would otherwise have felt like an interactive sculpture to encourage childlike play in people of all sizes. Having people there with me felt like the key difference— the time that I spent hanging out with my friends, in person, brought me a joy unlike any I found by posting those pictures online later.
ADMISSION: $42.00
GIFT SHOP: Yes
BATHROOM: Yes
WHEELCHAIR ACCESSIBLE: Yes
December 8: Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library
December 15: China Institute
December 23: Vacation!
December 30: Coney Island Museum
Cathy you are so trending denim