Frolic and fun at Meow Wolf

I love interactive art experiences but I wasn’t sure what my husband, Mark, and I should expect at Meow Wolf’s House of Eternal Return in Santa Fe, New Mexico.  

 

Their mission was so exciting: “To inspire creativity through art, exploration, and play so that imagination will transform the world.” Wow! Apparently this was not another of Santa Fe’s ubiquitous highbrow galleries.  

 

Many reviewers wrote effusively of their experiences. Not all: “200 artists got together and did a massive amount of drugs,” “crowded, dingy, a selfie backdrop...” Apparently there was a puzzle we could untangle but it sounded obscure. “Imagine trying to read a mystery book ... but the pages have been torn out and scattered around the house.” 

 

However, it was the vision of Meow Wolf’s founder Vince Kadlubek that really drew me. Despite the city’s artistic acclaim, he saw a crisis of imagination. A group of artists were on the outside looking in. They were agitators, storytellers, “graphic designers, technologists, writers, fabricators, painters, sculptors, musicians, rat gang leaders and shoplifters.” He had a solution: They would create “alternative realities and bring unique, indescribable, transformative immersive art experiences to the world.”

 

They began creating in 2008 with a wealth of creativity but no money.  

 

“I was zip-tying trash together and putting it on the wall,” one of the artists remembers. They needed a sustainability plan, a building, millions of dollars. In stepped an unlikely ally, George R.R. Martin, who’d made his fortune by writing the books that “Game of Thrones” is based on. The collective showed him a vacant 20,000-square-foot former bowling alley and described their idea.  

 

“It was incredible!” he remembers. “Other dimensions, other times, a secret story. It was pushing all my buttons.”  

 

Martin bought the building. In a video touring the still vacant site we are told, “It doesn’t look like much right now but ... eventually you’ll open up the refrigerator and you’ll wind up in another world.”  

 

When you enter the building the first thing you see is a façade of a Victorian house. You can go into the house and wander the rooms at your own pace. There are no actors, no map, no signs about what to do.  

 

A man standing near us with his pre-teen daughter looked so confused. “My daughter saw this in a tourist brochure so I bought us tickets but what are we supposed to do now?” he asked us. 

 

You’re meant to explore. 

 

It appears that the house was suddenly and inexplicably abandoned by a family. But when you open the refrigerator there’s a slide and you slip down into an inter-dimensional  dreamscape. There were 135 artists involved in fabricating the environment so each of the 70 sections is different. Trippy hallways of infinity mirrors, a glow-in-the-dark forest, perches to watch the crowd from high in the ceiling, narrow circular staircases, tubes to crawl through to secret passageways, a hyper-realistic kitchen but everything is black and white, lots of high-tech projections, videos, sounds and psychedelic graffiti.  

 

After a couple of hours we felt like over-stimulated children who’d stayed too long at a rambunctious birthday party.  

 

Meow Wolf (incidentally, the name was the result of pulling random words out of a hat) is now New Mexico’s biggest tourist attraction and has spawned similar experiences in Denver and Las Vegas. If you’re having your own crisis of imagination, maybe some playful exploration will help. It may not change the whole world but it will rock yours. Visit meowwolf.com. 

 

Roadtrips Charleston highlights interesting destinations within a few hour’s drive of Charleston, as well as more far flung locales. Go to peaksandpotholes.blogspot.com.