For decades, the Dixon Container Company building in Garden City made boxes. Today, it holds something that refuses to stay inside one.
The Dixon is the new permanent home of LED, a multimedia arts nonprofit founded in Boise in 2015 by artistic co-founders Lauren Edson and Andrew Stensaas, both native Idahoans. Over the past decade, LED has grown into a nationally recognized arts company creating immersive worlds through dance, live music, film, and visual storytelling. Named one of Dance Magazine's “25 to Watch,” LED could have built its future anywhere. Instead, its founders chose to stay in Idaho.
From the moment Lauren and Andrew stepped inside the then-vacant warehouse, they could see what it might become. A theater where there had once been a warehouse for boxes. A lounge where the retail space had been. A loft studio where artists could rehearse, teach, and create.
“It spoke so loudly,” Lauren remembers. “We could immediately see what it could become.”
That vision is at the heart of The Dixon.
“There is something about Boise's boomerang effect,” Lauren and Andrew shared. “We both grew up here. We leave, we grow, we experience the world, and then many of us find our way back. When we returned, we began to ask a different question: What if coming home meant investing in the artistic ecosystem of this place we love?”
Both had spent years building their artistic careers outside of Boise, Lauren in New York and Chicago, Andrew in Portland, before returning home. The Dixon became an opportunity not simply to bring LED home, but to invest in the place they had returned to.
Transformed through a $2 million capital campaign, the historic building is now one of the few spaces in the region where artists can create, rehearse, and perform under one roof.
On any given day, The Dixon is alive with creative work. LED might be deep in a creation process with dancers who have traveled from across the country, or rehearsing with its in-house band for an upcoming production. An artist resident might be developing new work in the Movement Loft. Lauren, Andrew, and the LED team might be imagining a First Friday event, a pop-up, or another way to invite the community through the doors.
And when a performance begins, The Dixon shifts again.
Audiences gather in the lounge, enjoy a drink, watch a performance, and linger afterward to meet the artists who made it. The boundaries between artist and audience, rehearsal and performance, theater and gathering place become intentionally porous.
That was part of the vision from the beginning: not simply to create a place where art happens, but a place where people can experience one another through art.
The site carries a history that predates LED. Local artist Surel Mitchell was a pioneer of Garden City's creative community and a driving force behind the Live-Work-Create District, envisioning a neighborhood where artists could root their lives, not just their studios, in one place. A prolific visual artist, Mitchell believed deeply in the importance of making, gathering, and building community. Her vision helped lay the foundation for artists that live and create here today.
The Dixon now fronts that district, and Lauren and Andrew see themselves as continuing the work Mitchell started.
“We're standing on the shoulders of individuals, especially Surel, who believed that artists could build a life here,” Lauren says. “We want The Dixon to be part of that story.”
The building is open to residencies, visiting artists, collaborations, and unexpected encounters, connecting Idaho artists to the wider artistic landscape while giving artists from beyond Idaho a reason to come here.
In January 2026, LED and the Alexa Rose Foundation launched Artist Haven, a residency designed to give performing artists time and space to develop work without the pressure of producing a finished product. Its inaugural resident was Doug Martsch, frontman of Boise's Built to Spill, an artist whose career embodies the kind of creative life that can grow from—and continue to contribute to—Idaho.
The residency is one example of what The Dixon makes possible: artists can come here to experiment, develop their craft, share their work, and connect with a community of other artists and audiences.
“We wanted to create the kind of place we might have needed when we were younger,” Lauren says. “A place where artists could come home, take risks, make ambitious work, and have the space and community to let their ideas grow.”
The Dixon is proof that extraordinary art doesn't have to come from somewhere else.
Sometimes, it comes home.