Meow Wolf wants to change the way you see the world — and yourself. A visit to one of the group’s immersive art destinations will coax you to loosen your grip on reality. This is a full-body, hands-on IRL experience where a combination of sculpture, painting, video, theater, light, and sound has been concocted to thrill and confuse visitors’ senses.
At their imaginative experiences — think: a worry-free escape room meets a totally trippy museum — visitors can tumble through an interdimensional portal located inside a clothes dryer or slide into a grocery store freezer and emerge into a new reality that’s perplexing and playful. If that sounds like your idea of fun, you’re in luck. If not, you may unravel. And that’s entirely the point. Disorientation is the fuel that Meow Wolf artists hope will light a creative fire in everyone.
“Meow Wolf is opening a gateway to learn what it means to engage with art,” explains Vince Kadlubek, who launched Meow Wolf in 2008 in Santa Fe, New Mexico, as a DIY artist collective alongside Sean Di Ianni, Matt King, Corvas Brinkerhoff, Emily Montoya, Caity Kennedy, and Benji Geary. (The group literally plucked their two-word name from a hat.) Their first permanent exhibition was built in an old bowling alley they purchased with the help of Santa Fe resident and Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin.
“We were kids in a warehouse that wanted room to do whatever we wanted, and our ambitions grew with everything we did,” Kennedy says. “It had no budget [or] resources except a ridiculous amount of passion.” Reimagined, renovated, and reopened in 2016 as the House of Eternal Return, the interactive exhibition’s 70 rooms are packed with mysterious installations, secret passageways, and surreal storytelling touch points.
Each visitor embarks on a personal journey guided by their own decisions as they pass through each space, pushing buttons, pulling levers, and opening drawers. There’s a deep narrative being told through notes, videos, and other elements — or no story at all if visitors choose to ignore it. “When people first enter, I would love for them to have no idea what’s going on,” Kennedy says. “Then, I want that confusion to shift to curiosity and impulsive exploration.”
The phantasmagoric experience became an unexpected, all-ages hit for Santa Fe, a city hitherto associated with traditional Southwestern art and turquoise jewelry. Encouraged by the success of the original location, Meow Wolf launched two subsequent projects with bigger budgets.
The ambitious, 52,000-square-foot Omega Mart opened in Las Vegas in February 2021. Playing with a creepy-fun, surreal supermarket theme, visitors can step beyond the aisles stocked with purchasable products and enter another world. Omega Mart features the work of 325 artists, from Las Vegas locals to international luminaries including Brian Eno. The weird outpost of wacky groceries fits right in to a city that’s well acquainted with dazzle.
Denver’s transportation-centric Convergence Station came next, opening in September 2021. More than 300 creative minds (including 115 from Colorado) unleashed a vast spectrum of projects that sprawl through 60,000 square feet of exhibition space spread across four levels. Visitors can explore Eemia, a glowing castle lost in a frozen limbo, and Numina, a outer-dimensional sentient plant.
Acceptance within the art establishment hasn’t always been easy. “Early on in Santa Fe, there was some fear around our work diluting Santa Fe’s finer art image,” Kadlubek says, “but that was quickly overcome, and the art world in all three cities are allies of ours.” Now, Meow Wolf is planning new locations and collaborations. The group recently teamed up with the makers of the Walkabout Mini Golf video game to create a course inspired by Numina.
Some critics have been skeptical about Meow Wolf’s approach to both art and business. “People come from all over the map — curators, critics, gallerists, artists — who aren’t sure about us,” Kennedy says. “There are people who are excited, freaked out, or even frightened. We have heard, ‘This is what will keep art alive [because] art is changing to meet the world.’ Others think we are cheap and commercial.”
Kadlubek shrugs off accusations that Meow Wolf is merely entertainment with no deeper philosophy. “Meow Wolf has been successful at not telling people how to engage with it and not telling people they need to call it art,” he says. “Some arts publications have wanted to ask our favorite question, ‘Is Meow Wolf art?’ Usually, we just kind of giggle about that and keep making stuff.”
The next stuff Meow Wolf is making will be in The Lone Star State. A new, 29,000-square-foot Grapevine location is slated to open this summer in the Grapevine Mills mall featuring the work of more than 30 Texas-based artists. And a Meow Wolf outpost in Houston is scheduled to debut 2024. Meanwhile, existing locations continue to change as installations and theatrics are transformed and updated on a rolling cycle of perpetual creation. It’s a successful strategy: In 2022, Meow Wolf’s locations recorded a total of 2.7 million visitors.
As the physical world has become confined by predictable design parameters, Meow Wolf’s visionaries believe their work matters now more than ever before. “This tendency has compromised our ability to explore and discover, to imagine, to envision possibility, to create the unprecedented,” Kadlubek says. “We hope that visiting a Meow Wolf inspires the imagination and reminds folks that the world can be different than it has been. And maybe more importantly, remind them that they can be different than how they’ve been.”
Laura Beausire is a Colorado-based writer and photographer who has contributed to Condé Nast Traveler, Wine Enthusiast, Hemispheres, Sierra, Robb Report, The Denver Post, and TravelAge West.
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