First, the Selig family disappeared, leaving behind a Victorian house filled with portals. Then, other portals opened after grocery store workers spilled a mysterious liquid. After that, the pace of these incidents picked up. A transportation hub in Denver began whisking people away to other realities, and 10-year-old Jared Fuqua went missing with someone or something named Happy Gerry. Then, in 2024, a Texas radio station somehow became lost in another dimension.
Meow Wolf, a Santa Fe-based art collective and entertainment company that creates interactive worlds, promises this isn’t the end — they have more stories to tell. Not only that, but all the stories weave into one overarching storyline, which they plan to reveal in the not-so-distant future.
The House of Eternal Return
The story of Meow Wolf began in 2008 when a group of risk-taking Millennial artists founded an art collaborative because they didn’t fit into the traditional Santa Fe art scene. After choosing a name by drawing two random words out of separate hats, they rented a warehouse, scavenged materials from dumpsters, and created elaborate fort-like structures, the forerunners of the interactive art exhibits they’re known for today.
Over time, they graduated to pop-up exhibits, including a grocery store with fictional products and a Noah’s Ark-like spaceship, The Due Return. Those successes inspired them to dream even bigger, and they rented an abandoned Santa Fe bowling alley from George R.R. Martin, author of the Game of Thrones series, and started work on The House of Eternal Return. The project took 150 artists roughly two years to complete and cost $2.7 million, raised mostly through investors.
House of Eternal Return at Meow Wolf Santa Fe (Uploaded to YouTube by Meow Wolf)
When it opened in 2016, Meow Wolf hoped to break even with 125,000 visitors. Instead, it welcomed 500,000 that year and became New Mexico’s number one tourist attraction.
Vince Kadlubek, the company’s first CEO, explained when I interviewed him in 2017 that he felt The House of Eternal Return largely owed its success to how unexpected it is. Day after day, people enter cookie cutter spaces that look and feel the same. A Home Depot in New Jersey will look almost exactly like a Home Depot in California. Meow Wolf takes the expected, such as a refrigerator, and transforms it into something unexpected.
At The House of Eternal Return, visitors enter the yard of a Victorian home at night. Even though it looks like a typical suburban house, it soon becomes obvious that the house holds secrets. Its occupants, the Selig family, have disappeared, and visitors can explore two-story house at their own pace, reading journals, rifling through the mail, and checking their computer for clues to their whereabouts.
Interactive Art
The unwritten rule is touch everything. Open every drawer, every container, every household appliance. Behind these common items lurk surprises, anything from glowing dishes in the cabinet to a washing machine that visitors can crawl through to the Meow Wolf multiverse, a world with towering neon plants, mushrooms that play notes when they’re touched, and giant aliens.
It’s in the multiverse that local artists’ work is largely featured, and visitors are encouraged to let their imaginations run wild. According to Kadlubek, the mystery surrounding the story and the interactive nature of the artworks attracts people to Meow Wolf who normally wouldn’t get excited about art. Being part of a Meow Wolf exhibit also exposes artists to a wider audience.
Claudia Bueno knows the difference that exposure can make. She created two pieces for Meow Wolf’s second permanent exhibit, Omega Mart, and it changed her career.
“I talk about Meow Wolf as my life before Meow Wolf and my life after Meow Wolf,” she says, adding that before working on Omega Mart, she spent a lot of time applying for grants and looking for opportunities. Now the work comes to her, especially since her Omega Mart installation, Pulse, has resonated with so many . Featuring handpainted patterns on layers of glass on three walls, the installation seems to organically move as light shines through it. Beuno describes it as a mediative break from the stimulus overload that the multiverse tends to be.
Since working with Meow Wolf, she received a commission for a “multi-gallery, mini-Meow Wolf with a storyline” for the Hermitage Museum & Gardens in Norfolk, Virginia, and she created a 20-foot-high piece similar to Pulse for the META Headquarters Building X in Redmond, Washington.
Common Threads
Meow Wolf launched Omega Mart in Las Vegas in February 2021. Like their earlier grocery store pop-up, Omega Mart contains fictional products such as Nut Free Salted Peanuts and Organic Rose Beef. (All 300 original items are available for purchase in the store.) It also has a fairly elaborate plot, involving the missing Omega Mart CEO and his granddaughter and a hostile company takeover by his daughter.
James Longmire, a writer, says that while all five Meow Wolf exhibits have different storylines and settings, certain elements reappear, namely portals and missing people. Some characters also reappear. But what visitors might not realize is the stories reflect what Meow Wolf is dealing with at the time.
“Whether people get it or not, there’s usually a lot of us in the story,” he says.
He uses Omega Mart as an example because it tackles themes of capitalism, consumerism, and family, topics Meow Wolf had to contend with, to some extent, as the company grew. But you can also see art imitating life at their third exhibit, Convergence Station, in Denver. There, a transit hub allows travel between four dimensions. In real life, Meow Wolf was juggling multiple locations.
Expanding Stories
After Convergence Station opened in September 2021, Meow Wolf waited two years to open The Real Unreal. Located inside a Grapevine, Texas, shopping mall, this experience resembles the one in Santa Fe, down to a similar house layout. Only this time, a boy goes missing, not an entire family.
Although it doesn’t seem to add much to the overarching story, Longmire cautions visitors against making assumptions since Meow Wolf writers don’t “nail down every possibility” when they launch a new exhibit. That way, the story can evolve and grow.
This flexibility also gives Meow Wolf the opportunity to eventually tie all the storylines together, which Longmire assures will happen someday. He admits it may not seem that way right now, especially since the latest exhibit, Radio Tave, takes another twist.
Centering on a radio station that is transported to another dimension, this Houston exhibit focuses on a multiverse that draws from local Texas influences and features a dive bar for angels, demons, aliens, and time travelers.
The multiverse expands later this year when Meow Wolf makes its Hollywood debut with an exhibit at the Westside LA entertainment complex HHLA. Longmire, who is lead writer for the project, says this Meow Wolf exhibit in a converted movie theater will pay homage to movies and storytelling. However, he can’t comment on the upcoming New York site’s theme.
“As we get closer to the unveiling of where this is all heading, fans and guests will see more connections between stories,” he promises.
Keeping Things Fresh
As Meow Wolf enters its tenth year of permanent installations, Longmire says fans don’t need to worry about running out of new Meow Wolf experiences. At The House of Eternal Return alone, it would take more than 200 hours to review all the available materials onsite. In fact, Meow Wolf has created so much material that Meow Wolf sells some online, like the Dramcorp Factory Manual from the Omega Mart storyline.
Visitors can find additional resources online, like the information on the Selig family computer, and exhibit videos, like the Omega Mart Training Video, on Meow Wolf’s YouTube channel. Even some of the characters, like Lucius Selig, have Facebook pages.
Additionally, Meow Wolf now has an app that provides additional insights and interactive experiences. Although the app currently only works for the Santa Fe, Grapevine, and Houston locations, visitors can purchase a RFID card onsite at Denver and Las Vegas that gives a similar experience.
Finally, Meow Wolf has partnered with Exalted Funeral to produce a not-yet-released role-playing game, called Tavers, where players collaborate to create worlds based on the Meow Wolf multiverse. It’s a fitting project for Meow Wolf’s 10th year designing permanent worlds since creativity and collaboration have always fueled the company. Now, players can add to the Meow Wolf multiverse with their own imaged worlds and stories.
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