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Meow wolf santa fe fridge8/17/2023 It’s a concept Meow Wolf has toyed with in the past, but not on this supermarket-size scale, and certainly not during a pandemic, when the very idea of a grocery store has taken on significantly more weight. What they will see is Meow Wolf’s most ambitious, risk-taking and suddenly brazenly topical endeavor yet: the grocery store-inspired Omega Mart. Meow Wolf is the anchor tenant - Los Angeles distillery Lost Spirits, which bridges fantasy and rum, is another intended occupant - and while Meow Wolf now doesn’t plan to open there until early 2021, provided the pandemic cooperates, of course, Area15 will begin a soft launch this fall that will allow visitors to see what Meow Wolf has planned. Work continues on its Las Vegas project, which will bring Meow Wolf closer to Los Angeles via a retail and entertainment facility dubbed Area15. Given that its Santa Fe outpost draws about 500,000 visitors per year, Meow Wolf’s growth was set to remake immersive entertainment into a new kind of theme park with the argument that art and design - and not intellectual property - is what draws an audience.īattered but not beaten, Meow Wolf, which received a Paycheck Protection Program loan for $5 million to $10 million, still has a pulse. Up first, however, is an ambitious 52,000-square-foot multistory exhibit just a few minutes from the Las Vegas Strip that was supposed to open this year. More damning, the pandemic has delayed the expansion of Meow Wolf properties planned for Denver, Phoenix and Washington, D.C., the latter two of which the company now says are “still actively being considered,” but had no updates on timing. So far, the company has laid off or furloughed more than 200 of its staff, a cut that amounts to about 56% of Meow Wolf’s workforce. By the end of the week, House of Eternal Return, Meow Wolf’s indoor playground for adults and families, would close - and as of this writing, the touch-heavy attraction remains shuttered. Meow Wolf too would see its plans derailed. In the coming days, the NBA, MLB and cultural institutions such as Disneyland would be forced to deal with the realities of COVID-19. Leaving the vehicle, I began exploring, traversing wooden and fiberglass structures that were neon forests and intergalactic travel agencies, eventually settling into a trailer in what seemed like a backyard campground. Meow Wolf’s theater-like set seeks to envelope us as if in a fairy tale, using modern life not as a cause to escape but as a jumping-off point. The effect wasn’t fancy - a naysayer could write it off as a glorified screensaver - but Meow Wolf’s House of Eternal Return isn’t throwing down a high-art gauntlet so much as it is extending an invitation. To sit in this strange vehicle was to essentially lie back, and lie back I did, probably for a good 20 minutes, looking out beyond the dashboard onto a screen that aimed to mimic the sensation of gliding through a supernova. The handles and knobs appeared to have been lifted from a black-and-white sci-fi serial and the steering wheel, inaccessible to any human without a ladder, sat motionless even as I watched a horizon rush by through a windshield that stood perpendicular to the ground. This was supposed to be the year that Meow Wolf, creator of interactive experiences, became so integral to popular culture that, in the words of one of its filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, it would be well on its way to becoming a “provider of themed entertainment and creative experiences on the level that people think of Disney, Universal and Marvel.”Īnd on March 8, as I spent a Sunday afternoon in the company’s Santa Fe, N.M., exhibition space, that boast didn’t seem so far-fetched.Ĭrouching down in one of Meow Wolf’s byzantine rooms I entered what appeared to a doorway and found myself in the back seat of a van-like contraption that seemed to have been willed into existence by the creator of some long lost TV show.
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