Meow Wolf is an American arts and entertainment company that creates large-scale interactive and immersive art installations. Founded in 2008, its flagship attraction, House of Eternal Return in Santa Fe, New Mexico, is a facility, which includes a concert venue in addition to the main immersive art installation. In 2021 their second installation, Omega Mart, opened in Area15 in Las Vegas. A third location in Denver, Convergence Station, opened to the public on September 17, 2021.Daru, Dan, Aimee Lewis "Meow Wolf opens Convergence Station exhibit in new building on Friday" KDVR.com (Sept. 13, 2021) Accessed Oct. 11, 2021. A fourth location, The Real Unreal, opened in the Grapevine Mills Mall in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex on July 14, 2023. The fifth location, Radio Tave, opened in the Fifth Ward of Houston, Texas, on October 31, 2024. Meow Wolf's sixth location is planned to open in Los Angeles, California in 2026.
History Originating in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Meow Wolf was formed informally in February 2008 as an artist collective partnership by Quinn Tincher, Matt King, Matt Smith, Megan Burns and Vince Kadlubek. The partnership anarchically formed and reformed as it installed larger projects through time. Some partners tried to exclude others by claiming to exclusively own the art collective partnership via LLCs formed subsequent to the breakout Due Return project. In October 2014, Sean Di Ianni became a member of VCSME Art City LLC, as Meow Wolf joined the Creative Startups business accelerator competition that taught LLC members to form a corporation to dispossess the anarchic partnership of its intellectual property. The other members of that new 2014 LLC were members of the older MW LLC from September 2011: Matt King, Corvas Brinkerhoff, Emily Montoya, Caity Kennedy, and Vince Kadlubek, "a community of punk, quirky, artistic pals" hoping to take exclusive ownership of the 25-or-so-partner anarchic partnership supplying Santa Fe and other locales with alternative art and music venues. Having documented much of its own early visual history, Meow Wolf produced a documentary film about its own genesis, entitled Meow Wolf: Origin Story, which was released in 2018. By 2019, the collective held the works of 200 different artists and employed more than 150 people. By 2024, Meow Wolf employed 1,000 people across the country. It has received widespread praise for its impact on the New Mexico and national art scene. The name was chosen by randomly drawing two words from a hat at the first meeting of the collective (everyone present put two scraps of paper with a word on each one in).
Early projects 2008–2014
In the early days, the artists' first large-scale venture working outside the establishment represented in Santa Fe's galleries was The Due Return, a more than , two-story ship installed in 2011 into the Muñoz Waxman Gallery of the Center for Contemporary Arts and filled with rooms and objects suggesting details of implied inhabitants' lives. This was partly funded by a microgrant from the city government. Its success -- a record CCA crowd at the opening -- prompted an invalid June 2, 2011 Meow Wolf trademark application by David Loughridge (incorrectly applying as an individual, even though the entire Meow Wolf art collective partnership actually conceived and installed the immersive art). The David Loughridge estate assigned the invalid Meow Wolf trademark (Serial# 85336601) to Meow Wolf, Inc. in January 2017
Some other notable projects include: "Biome Neuro Norb" (2008), a science fiction-inspired installation, "Auto Wolf" (2009), an installation centered around the destruction and reuse of a donated car, "The Moon is to Live On" (2010), a multimedia theatrical play, "Geodecadent I" and "Geodecadent II" (2010), a series of installations based on geodesic domes.
In pursuit of teaching collaborative arts practices, Meow Wolf formed CHIMERA in 2011. In 2012 CHIMERA worked with approximately one thousand Santa Fe students to create Omega Mart, an installation in the form of a fictitious grocery store stocked with "satirical goods". Omega Mart was deliberately placed away from Santa Fe's arts district to attract a more diverse audience. The Omega Mart concept was revived at Area15 in Las Vegas in 2021. In 2013, CHIMERA began working with the Albuquerque Museum of Art and History's classroom mentorship program for gifted students on an installation named "Project Dreamscape". As of 2022 CHIMERA was no longer active.
Meow Wolf has built notable shows outside of Santa Fe. "Glitteropolis" (2011), at the New Mexico State University Art Gallery, used 50 pounds of glitter. "Nucleotide" (2013) was a pastel, cave-like installation in Chicago's Thomas Robertello Gallery. The majority of "Nucleotide" was conceived and built in Chicago over a three-month period by 18 members of the collective.
2014–2019 In 2016 Meow Wolf opened its first permanent installation, House of Eternal Return, built by a collective of 135 artists in Santa Fe.
Meow Wolf became a Certified B Corporation in 2017.
In January 2018, Meow Wolf announced two new art complexes, in Las Vegas and Denver. On November 29, 2018, the documentary Meow Wolf: Origin Story was released in movie theaters around the United States in a one-time only showing. In 2019, plans for a Phoenix attraction were announced, featuring a exhibit with a 400-room hotel. The Phoenix project did not actualize. Meow Wolf also announced the same year a permanent exhibition in Washington, DC. The exhibition, a partnership with the Cafritz Foundation, was planned to open in 2022 and would have been a three-level, 75,000-square-foot structure located in the Fort Totten community. The Washington, DC project did not actualize.
2020–2022 The New York Times Magazine featured Meow Wolf in an article titled "Can an Art Collective Become the Disney of the Experience Economy?", describing the challenges faced by the group's founders in shifting from work as underground artists to running a multimillion-dollar corporation. In early 2021 the firm announced that they would abandon their plans for a Meow Wolf themed hotel in Phoenix, although still planned an exhibition in the city. The permanent exhibition in Washington, DC, in Fort Totten, was also canceled later in the year. In 2021 the permanent exhibition in Las Vegas, a redo of their concept Omega Mart, opened in January and the Denver art complex called Convergence Station in September.
Meow Wolf co-founder and senior creative director Matt King died on July 9, 2022.
2022-Present On May 11, 2022, Meow Wolf announced The Real Unreal, an experience to be opened in Grapevine Mills. The experience would later open on July 14, 2023.
Projects House of Eternal Return
In January 2015, author George R. R. Martin pledged $2.7 million to renovate and lease a vacant bowling alley to create a permanent facility for Meow Wolf. This was supplemented by additional funding, including $50,000 from the city of Santa Fe and $100,000 from a crowd-funding campaign. The installation, called House of Eternal Return opened March 18, 2016. It received a 2017 Thea Award from the Themed Entertainment Association and has been cited as the tenth best music venue in the United States. Multiple musical acts have filmed music videos at House of Eternal Return including The Revivalists and T-Pain.
Meow Wolf's Kaleidoscape 2018 Meow Wolf's Kaleidoscape, an "other-worldly" dark ride based around the concept of entering a piece of art, was announced for Elitch Gardens Theme Park in Denver, Colorado, replacing Ghost Blasters. The exhibit debuted during Elitch Garden's 2019 summer season; the Denver Post described Kaleidoscape as "a hallucinogenic gallery of neon art." The attraction was intended as a prequel to their Denver exhibit, Convergence Station, with the ride experience being focused around the Quantum Department of Transportation harnessing the power of a Cosmic Egg to open a path to a new universe.
Omega Mart
In January 2018, Meow Wolf announced a second interactive art installation in Las Vegas, Nevada as anchor attraction at a new retail, art and entertainment complex called Area15. Opened in 2021, Omega Mart is a multisensory grocery store that blends narrative storytelling, technical wizardry, and commerce. Omega Mart aims to guide guests into fantastical areas with themes examining American consumerism and corporate responsibility. The exhibit features more than 325 writers, painters, sculptors, actors, lighting designers, musicians and more.
The Omega Mart concept was reused from an earlier temporary installation in Santa Fe. The exhibit follows the hypothetical corporation that owns Omega Mart, Dramcorp, in an alternate dimension. In this dimension, they harness a power titled "The Source" to continue to sell their products. In its first year it had over 1 million visitors.
Convergence Station
In 2018, Meow Wolf announced plans for a venue in downtown Denver, Colorado, at I-25 and Colfax Ave. It opened September 2021. The building is Meow Wolf's largest installation, rising 30 feet over three elevated viaducts and employing more than 100 local artists (including indigenous artistsCastillo, Monica "Meow Wolf launches in Denver, taking visitors (finally) to Convergence Station" CPR News ) specializing in a wide range of media, including architecture, sculpture, painting, photography, video production, cross-reality (AR/VR/MR), music, audio engineering, narrative writing, costuming, and performance.
Convergence Station is presented as an interdimensional transport hub of the Quantum Department of Transportation linking Earth to the Convergence of Worlds, named for a cosmic Convergence event that resulted in fragments of four planets fusing together, consisting of the C Street of an ecumenopolis named Immensity, the crystal mines of the Ossuary, the frozen world of Eemia, and a cosmic superorganism named Numina.
It houses several exhibits, including a large-scale physical fabrication of The Cathedral' that the company digitized for The Infinite Playa, a recognized universe in the Burning Man multiverse.
A rotating exhibit of local artists is on display in Convergence Station's Galleri Gallery; the first to be featured is Denver's Lumonics collective, with works from light art pioneers Mel and Dorothy Tanner.
Convergence Station also features tributes to Denver's "Gang of 19" (who would later become the organization ADAPT) who played a central role in making mass transit accessible to disabled people.Hansen, Mariah "A first look at Convergence Station, Meow Wolf's Newest Interactive exhibit" (Sept. 15, 2021) Accessed Oct. 11, 2021.
Vortex Music Festival
One of Meow Wolf's music festivals, Vortex, was held in Taos, New Mexico, in 2018 and 2019, then paused for two years due to COVID and moved to Denver in 2022.
The Real Unreal
In May 2022, Meow Wolf announced its fourth permanent exhibition, located in Grapevine (a suburb in the Mid-Cities region of the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex) situated in the Grapevine Mills Mall in a former big box store. In May 2023, the name of the exhibit was revealed to be The Real Unreal, and it opened on July 14, 2023.