Take Me to the River of Time

Marvin Stockwell unlocks the front door to the former Mississippi River Museum on Mud Island and lets out a shout. The up escalator is working. 

The escalators were first installed when the Mud Island River Park was built in 1982, but they haven’t worked in years. Stockwell asks the worker installing huge vinyl decals on the window that say “BVO” who fixed it. “I don’t know. It just came on,” he says. 

“BVO” stands for “Baron Von Opperbean.” It’s a massive new immersive art project that is taking over the river history museum on Mud Island, which has been abandoned since 2019. It’s the brainchild of Christopher Reyes, the renowned artist who was behind the groundbreaking digital arts organization Live From Memphis in the 2000s and 2010s. For the last decade, Reyes has been pursuing a dream of creating a sprawling interactive installation that combines sculpture, video, sound, and play. I’m here three days before the launch on Friday, May 1st. Artists, technicians, and workers swarm the halls and exhibit rooms of the 36,000-square-foot facility, putting the finishing touches on the first phase of the project. Everyone is in a hurry. Clipped conversations between people looking for cables, warning you away from wet paint, and troubleshooting recalcitrant equipment all end the same: “72 hours. 72 hours. 72 hours.” 

We catch up with Reyes and BVO CEO Jee Vahn Knight in what will become the gift shop 72 hours from now. Stockwell tells them about the escalator. “I went to meet him in the parking lot, and when we came back, it was on,” he says. 

The need to fix the broken escalators had come up between Vahn Knight and Reyes this morning, but now that one of them is working, no one knows who fixed it. “We just sent that out into the universe,” says Reyes. “Sometimes, I get better results that way.” 

Fish

It began with Fish.

During the early 2010s, when Reyes started experimenting with projection mapping, Disney Imagineers had long been using specialized projectors to do things like make statues talk and ghosts appear in the Haunted Mansion, but the development of digital projectors and rapid advances in video software in the early 21st century had made wrapping physical objects with moving images accessible to artists without Disney-level budgets. 

Ten years ago, in the spring and summer of 2016, Reyes, his then-partner Sara Fleming, and friend Laura Jean Hocking collaborated on the first large-scale art exhibition to use projection mapping in Memphis. The project had begun as a documentary film about the Memphis Zoo Aquarium, but Reyes suggested something more immersive. “I said, ‘Why do a film that you get to show one night, when instead you could do an installation, and it’ll be there a month or two, and lots of people could get to see it?’ I think that resonated with them.” 

Fish was the first blockbuster exhibition mounted by Crosstown Arts. Reyes, Fleming, and Hocking transformed the gallery into a submarine. Portals painted on the walls revealed aquatic creatures swimming serenely, while an ambient music soundtrack soothed visitors. 

The reaction to Fish was intense. People came back multiple times just to hang out in the darkened gallery. Yogis brought in their classes to stretch among the swirling imagery. In his review, Commercial Appeal art critic Fredric Koeppel wrote, “Fish is the most magical thing I have seen in Memphis probably ever. And the coolest, too.” 

Reyes knew he was onto something. “I thought, ‘This is what I want to do with the rest of my life.’ Fish showed me the amount of joy that you can bring people with very little, but you have to do it in a creative way. The immersive experience was the kind of thing where you could unlock people’s sense of joy.” 

Reyes’ ambition told him to think bigger. Immersive environments could be beautiful, but in a world where so much is competing for people’s attention, it’s not enough. “It needed a story,” Reyes says. “That’s where the idea of Baron Von Opperbean was born.” 

The Baron Debuts

Reyes spent the next few years building new worlds on paper. It was all centered around the character of Baron Von Opperbean, an eccentric tinkerer who developed technology to travel the multiverse. In Reyes’ concept, the Baron has gone missing, presumably lost somewhere in the multiverse, and visitors to the installation would go from room to room, experiencing radically different environments while searching for clues to the Baron’s fate. 

Reyes knew it would take a huge space to realize his vision. “I pitched it to a lot of people, but I just couldn’t get anybody to give me money to do it right. I went through several groups of folks that said, ‘Yeah, let’s do it in this location or this location.’ But I was never able to get anybody to commit.” 

In early 2020, artist Yvonne Bobo purchased an unused factory off Vance Avenue in Midtown to open Off The Walls Arts. The new facility’s first exhibit was Quadrant 360, a 2,000-square-foot proof of concept meant to pave the way for a full-sized BVO. But just as it was scheduled to open to the public, the Covid-19 pandemic exploded. Reyes and a small group of dedicated friends soldiered through the construction and opened mid-summer with limited entry designed to help facilitate social distancing. It would prove to be an even bigger hit than Fish, selling more than 4,000 tickets in less than two weeks. 

“It was crazy,” recalls Reyes. “I really thought that, with the success we had even in spite of Covid, that it would have been so much easier to convince people to do a permanent location, to get behind it and invest in it. From 2021, I’ve been hammering it every day. Let’s do this space or that space, the [Mid-South] Coliseum, the Luciann Theatre. There were tons of different spaces that I looked at, and had conversations with people, but it was like pulling teeth … I put so much effort into telling this story and proving that it would work over time. I didn’t go in with a plan on a napkin. I had financials. I could show other industry projects that were extraordinarily successful.” 

Meanwhile, in New Mexico

The concept of immersive, interactive art has been around for years. In the late 1990s, St. Louis artist Bob Cassilly filled an abandoned shoe factory with thousands of interactive sculptures made from junk. Within two years, the City Museum was attracting 300,000 visitors per year; by the time Cassilly died in 2011, that number had grown to more than 700,000. 

In 2008, a Santa Fe, New Mexico, artist collective picked two words out of a hat to name their new interactive project. “Meow Wolf became the No. 1 tourist destination in the entire state of New Mexico within a year,” says Jee Vahn Knight. “The entire [tourism] industry got completely flipped on its head by a city with 75,000 people.” 

Vahn Knight already had experience in the museum world, such as working with NASA to preserve Saturn moon rockets at the Huntsville U.S. Space & Rocket Center, when she signed on with Meow Wolf as the organization’s director of marketing strategy. Now, Meow Wolf installations in Las Vegas, Denver, Los Angeles, and Houston draw millions of annual visitors.

“I got to Memphis six and a half years ago,” says Vahn Knight. “After I got here, people annoyed me all the time, because they would say, ‘Hey Jee, there’s a Meow Wolf in Memphis!’ And I said, ‘There isn’t a Meow Wolf in Memphis, ’cause I left Meow Wolf when I moved to Memphis.’ Then they said, ‘Oh, but Meow Wolf is coming to Memphis.’ I said, ‘Meow Wolf is not coming to Memphis. Meow Wolf is doing a whole other strategy.’ Then they’re like, ‘Okay, there’s something like Meow Wolf that’s in Memphis. It’s called Oppenheimer or something.”

Down by the River

After Quadrant 360, Reyes attracted some helpers: Marvin Stockwell, Kathryn Hicks, and Ruben Bruson. By this time, the prospectus had grown considerably; BVO was seeking millions of dollars in investment to make a state-of-the-art interactive installation. 

“When I first saw the pitch, I was like, okay, this sounds cool, but how are you going to do this?” says Nate Smith, director of programs at Epicenter Memphis. “I get what they’re going for, but then I met Chris and Kathryn, and I realized they actually had not just the creative talent — which is important, because you have to visualize all this — but the actual technical skill to build this. It’s not just a dream and some pictures, they’ve thought through physically how they would do this in an affordable, sustainable way … I was familiar with Meow Wolf, so saw immediately the potential not just for an amazing attraction in Memphis, but for the opportunities for expansion and multiple revenue lines, and that this can really be an innovative driver of rapid economic growth in Memphis, which is what we’re really excited about.”

After raising a round of funding through the crowdsourcing platform Wefunder, BVO finally found a home thanks to Carol Coletta of Memphis River Parks Partnership (MRPP). “I had known Carol since the early ’90s, because I had moved Downtown and she was giving tours to people, saying, ‘Look how much potential Downtown has!’” says Reyes. 

While MRPP was focused on the $60 million revamp of Tom Lee Park, Mud Island had fallen into disuse and disrepair. Before she retired in late 2024, Coletta helped pave the way for BVO to take over the abandoned museum. 

“Finally we got here and, I mean, it was like magic,” says Reyes.

Inside the museum were twisting corridors, ample room to build out exhibits, and, most extraordinarily, two full-sized mock-ups of river boats. When Reyes reconfigured his plans around the existing assets, the project became known as Baron Von Opperbean and the River of Time.

A Beautiful Kind of Crazy

Despite the lack of funding, Reyes and a skeleton crew started to work on building the Baron’s world. Word started to spread, and finally, Vahn Knight’s curiosity got the better of her. She reached out to Stockwell on LinkedIn, sharing her experience with Meow Wolf, and seeking a meeting. 

“When I came the first time, the power was out,” she recalls. “Ruben, Chris, Marvin, and Kathryn had all these flashlights, running through the office like, ‘Let us show you the whole thing!’ I was just coming to say hi.” 

“We had already hired her in our minds,” says Reyes. 

Vahn Knight was stunned by what she saw. The original Meow Wolf installation had been built in an abandoned bowling alley. This was a 36,000-square-foot ready-made museum space. “The size is insane. I love brutalist architecture. There’s just a beauty in how monolithic it is,” she says. “When they walked me out onto the boats, I was half in wonder and half in the logistics of how do you get this open as soon as possible? My brain fired in both directions, because here’s this asset, you can do whatever you want. It’s yours to modify. It’s yours to turn it into something new. It’s here, in the building. I was like, ‘Fellas, you are 17 miles down a marathon. You don’t even realize it.’” 

Vahn Knight says Reyes is “… a particular, beautiful kind of crazy. He’s a grounded human being. I don’t know if everybody knows that, but there’s a practicality alongside his big ideas.”

Reyes says he’s grateful Vahn Knight found them. “The amount of work and bureaucracy she takes on, I never imagined that kind of thing. When I first got into this, I was thinking, oh, I would just put my head down and stay quiet and do my thing over here. But that’s not how stuff gets done. That’s why it’s so important that we brought in Jee, someone with experience on that scale.” 

“There was an education on the investor side, there was an education on the municipal side,” says Vahn Knight. “Hope fatigue. That’s how I describe it. Not that hope is bad, but the city is clearly exhausted from being told to have hope and optimism, and told to get excited about something, and then it doesn’t follow through. You have a lot of people who are like, ‘I believe, Chris, I believe you.’ But they’re just exhausted from wanting to fully believe in the city, and it not coming to fruition, which is why we shifted towards, ‘Don’t worry about it, just join us when we’re open. Come and see it. We’re not asking you to put your whole lives and dreams into it like we are. Just be open to the possibilities once we’re there.’

“The alchemy or the spark in this project is Memphis. It is people who have been here for decades, whose creative life bleeds out of them into the ground.”

World Building

Soon after I arrive for the BVO ribbon-cutting ceremony on April 29th, I see Graham Burks, the video artist known as Infinity Stairs, and his collaborator, electronic musician Thomas Corbin, best known for his band General Labor. They wander wide-eyed into the crowd pressing around the main entrance. “We just plugged our stuff in, and it worked!” says Burks. 

“It worked the first time!” says Corbin. 

The BVO build-out has employed a who’s who of Memphis artists. “I’m getting to work in my own town on stuff that’s fun, and I don’t have to go to Nashville, which is rad,” says Michael Roy, the muralist and sculptor known as Birdcap. “It’s been pretty great! I get to run the shop down there and keep all of the tools running to try and get some nice, polished finishes.” 

“Michael’s done a way better job than I would have done — like exceptionally better,” says Reyes. 

Ari Morris is a music producer with 22 gold and platinum records on his resume. His experience with immersive Dolby Atmos surround sound has been invaluable for BVO, where a single room can incorporate more than 180 recorded tracks. “Installation experiences are always fun,” he says. “I’ve been working in immersive audio for the better part of a decade at this point, and this is definitely the first installation I’m doing that’s as complex as this, as far as the sound design that’s gonna be happening through the rooms. It’s a nice change of pace from being in the recording studio every day.”

The initial phase of BVO includes about 8,000 square feet of rooms and corridors full of handmade science-fiction fantasy environments. The buildout will continue in phases until the entire 33,000 square feet of exhibition space is up and running sometime next year. Even then, BVO will continue to evolve. 

“You could totally immerse yourself in the world of the Baron Von Opperbean universe, finding out little tidbits of information that help you get around in the space,” says Reyes. “As you find interesting things about this universe, things around you start to make sense. We’ve got the world building, and what that does is, instead of it just being the story about the Baron, you’re supposed to have your own story, your own adventure. People are like, ‘Where are the instructions?’ And I’m like, ‘If you just jump through a portal in the multiverse, you think there’s going to be instructions?’ What’s amazing about the system we’ve made here is that we’ll go back and it will change over time.

“I want there to be a whole universe of possibilities.” 

Ready for Launch

“I really think we’re going to be kickstarting a creative Renaissance here in Memphis,” says BVO co-founder Kathryn Hicks. “So I think it’s a big kickoff to bringing life back to the island.” 

The prospects for success are certainly there. The immersive entertainment industry in America is currently valued at $148 billion and is expected to grow to four times that size by 2033. Those present for the ribbon cutting were sold by what they saw. “I’m very excited about this opportunity that’s something unique on Mud Island,” says Dr. Jeff Warren, the Memphis City Council Chair of the Parks and Environment Committee. “I think it’s a good way to rejuvenate this part of Mud Island, and this is going to bring a lot of people to Memphis that we have no idea about. I’m not really someone who’s done this, but I tell you, I think there’s a market for people who really like this experience, and I think it’s going to be something our kids and younger people, particularly gamers, are gonna really love.”

Baron Von Opperbean and the River of Time officially opened to the public on May 1st. Stockwell says about 1,000 people came through the doors in its first week. Many of the visitors also explored the River Walk. “They came for BVO, but they enjoyed the rest of the island, too,” says Stockwell. 

Vahn Knight says, “The city spends too much time thinking about what Memphis was, and too much time using phrases like ‘it will be,’ and forgets that the city is amazing right now. So stop letting the past steal, and stop letting the potential, the future, steal, and just be Memphis. People were talking about ‘When Mud Island gets redeveloped …’ What are you talking about? We’re doing it. It’s happening now.”