Meow Wolf is making a $50 million investment in its new attraction in Denver. (image provided by Meow Wolf)
When a group of Santa Fe artists couldn’t find a gallery to exhibit their offbeat body of work, they built one. The exhibition was a howling success — and now it’s slinking into Denver, prompting development in one of the city’s rare untapped neighborhoods.
Why stare at a painting on a museum wall when you can walk inside of it instead?
That’s the question driving Meow Wolf, a ten-year-old Santa Fe arts collective creating avant-garde, freewheeling, maximalist artwork designed to plunge viewers headfirst into fantastical installations.
Case in point: House of Eternal Return, Meow Wolf’s first permanent exhibition, a bizarre interactive art viewing experience built inside of a 30,000-square-foot bowling alley in Santa Fe’s Midtown Innovation District.
Inside the old bowling alley – beyond the doors of a fabricated, two-story Victorian mansion – giant, whimsical, touchable art installations are interspersed with multimedia elements and a mysterious narrative. The experience is so unique, even Meow Wolf co-founder and senior VP of creative Matt King struggles to describe it.
“It’s hard to grasp what it is until you experience it,” he says. His analogy? Explaining House of Eternal Return to somebody who hasn’t visited it — that’s kind of like describing the color orange to somebody who has never seen orange.
It’s safe to say Meow Wolf’s House of Eternal Return is unlike any other art in the world. And now, the unique concept is landing in Denver.
What’s a Meow Wolf, Anyway?
Founded in 2008, Meow Wolf started as a small collective of ten artists — “People who realized they weren’t going to make it in the traditional art scene,” says John Feins, Meow Wolf’s VP of communications.
The name Meow Wolf was drawn from a hat one night. “None of us were fully behind it at the time,” King admits.
“Once we established our medium and art form, that really solidified us as Meow Wolf. The collective “encompasses the ideas of inclusiveness, working together, and creative spirit,” he adds.
Before opening their permanent installation in Santa Fe in 2015, Meow Wolf installed 26 temporary exhibits in Albuquerque, Chicago, Boulder, Las Vegas, New Orleans, New York, Oregon, and San Antonio, among other locations. From the get-go, the group focused on creative and social projects that challenge viewers to rethink art entirely.
In 2011, Meow Wolf got its first break when it was tasked with building a massive installation inside Santa Fe’s Center for Contemporary Arts.
The exhibit, a predecessor to House of Eternal Return, was only up for three months, but over 25,000 people came to see it — showing Meow Wolf that audiences were interested in their unconventional take on art.
Meow Wolf wanted to create something permanent, but a collective of underpaid artists didn’t exactly have the wherewithal to pull off their big vision.
Then three years ago, the group caught another break when Meow Wolf co-founder Vince Kadlubek ran the idea for a permanent, large-scale, and immersive art installation past an old boss, George RR Martin, creator of Game of Thrones.
Kadlubek wasn’t even expecting Martin to return his call — let alone buy the old Silva Lanes bowling alley for $2.7 million. “Suddenly we had a 30,000-square-foot facility with parking, and House of Eternal Return was a go,” says Feins.
With crowd funding and donations from other outside investors, House of Eternal Return launched in March of 2016, in Santa Fe’s newish Midtown Innovation District.
All the while, the Meow Wolf pack morphed into a company composed of over 300 artists straddling disciplines, working in architecture, sculpture, painting, photography, video production, virtual and augmented reality, audio engineering, narrative writing, costuming, and more.
If You Build It, Will They Come?
Meow Wolf aimed for 125,000 visitors in 2016, but a whopping 400,000 came out to see House of Eternal Return that year.
“The concern was that everybody would come once, and then we’d be sitting on this expensive art installation with very few people visiting,” Feins explains.
Turned out, one time simply wasn’t enough. Five hundred thousand visitors came to Meow Wolf in 2016, and, to date, over a million have walked through House of Eternal Return’s alluring front door.
The family-friendly exhibition was built to appeal to all generations, and that’s been good for business. “It’s weird to find something three generations can do together,” Feins muses.
House of Eternal Return has also benefited from Santa Fe’s art tourism — but what surprised the collective is how much local love the exhibition enjoys.
About half of the visitors who come to House of Eternal Return are from New Mexico, and Meow Wolf’s Denver attraction can probably expect to see a similar in-state versus out-of-state break-up.
Denverites can also expect Meow Wolf to contribute positively to the city’s flourishing art scene, driving even more art tourism dollars to town.
In 2017, for example, the state of New Mexico estimated $380 million dollars in economic impact from Meow Wolf over the next ten years. “We’ve had a huge economic impact on Santa Fe and the state,” Feins says, noting a sense that tourists are now coming to Santa Fe specifically to see Meow Wolf.
What’s more, local businesses in Santa Fe’s gritty Midtown Innovation District, where Meow Wolf is located, have seen double-digit gains in their revenue since Meow Wolf entered the scene. Will businesses in Jefferson Park benefit in a similar way?
> > > > > > > > >
(continued …)
By Jamie Siebrase | Jamie Siebrase is a Denver-based freelance writer who writes about art, culture, and parenting for Westword and Colorado Parent.
Read the whole article here:
http://www.confluence-denver.com/features/meow.aspx?utm_source=Emma&utm_medium=Email&utm_term=Reinventing+the+Art+Museum%3a+Everything+You+Need+to+Know+About+Meow+Wolf%27s+Big+Move+to+Denver&utm_content=Newsletter&utm_campaign