A former industrial building, the Arts Factory in front of you seeded the entire 18b Arts District and remains one of the stranger success stories in Las Vegas's history. The Factory occupies a former industrial building on Charleston Boulevard and was converted in the late 1990s into a complex of artist studios and gallery spaces that provided the 18b neighborhood with its first anchor institution and its defining identity.
The genius of the Arts Factory was straightforwardness: cheap rent, flexible spaces, and the simple act of aggregating creative workers in proximity to each other. Las Vegas had artists before the Arts Factory, but it did not have an artist community — the diffuse, car-dependent geography of the city made spontaneous creative congregation nearly impossible. By putting studios in the same building, the Arts Factory created the conditions for a genuine artistic neighborhood.
The relationship between Las Vegas's arts community and its tourism industry has always been complicated. The city's casinos employ thousands of performing artists and fund enormous entertainment productions, but the institutional arts infrastructure — museums, galleries, independent theaters — has historically been thin relative to the city's size and wealth. The Arts Factory and the 18b district exist as a correction to that history, proof that a city does not have to be defined solely by what it exports to tourists. Las Vegas, it turns out, also has a life of its own.