New Mexico, The Meow Wolf Part

 16 May 2022

Meow Wolf

After being overstimulated visually and auditorilly for two hours this afternoon, it’s hard to slow down and concentrate on a blog post. Since we had a tour guide and driver today (thank you Janet!), we did a LOT. More about that later. In this post I’m going to concentrate on only Meow Wolf, a two hour immersive art experience that all three of us liked! I thought I had opened every single door but as we were walking out, Dan told me that I missed the eyeball room and Janet had found the “etch-A-sketch” room!

This loose storyline takes place ostensibly in a house that has portals that take you to other dimensions of space and time. The refrigerator is a portal, for example. So is the fireplace. The end of a bedroom closet leads out to another space (quite near the “eyeball room” if memory serves). 

The entire installation was very creative and fun and loud and colorful. You have to see it to understand. 

Apparently there are those who go to see the installation who also try to solve the mystery of why the family who used to live in the house are no longer there…what happened to them? Did they break through the space/time continuum? We just went to see what it was all about for ourselves. Thank you to Kayla and Sara who clued us in to this. Currently there are installations by the same parent art group in Las Vegas and also in Denver; each one has it’s own theme. Would I go to see those places? Yes; yes I would. This was crazy fun even if you aren’t trying to solve anything!

Welcome to Meow Wolf Santa Fe

The refrigerator portal

The fireplace portal

Finding clues in a notebook left behind after the family disappeared

This couple was hunting down clues

Janet checks her phone

Each clamshell produces a different tone when struck

This reminded me of an alley in Bangkok 

Given all the color and pattern happening everywhere else, the BW rooms were a bit of a shock!

A live band played a few numbers while we were there.

Maybe my favorite room, completely covered with plastic and metal bottle caps, discarded diskettes, old CDs, tins, squashed aluminum cans, and all kinds of cast-offs. Colorful. Textural. Weird and wonderful!

This light presentation reminded me of Kusama’s Infinity Mirrors exhibition

Laser harp

Playing the laser harp (photo cred: Janet Carter Kumar)

Shoulda paid more attention to this guy at the beginning; we might’ve figured stuff out. Clues abound on the table in the dining room…

The house where interdimensional travel happens…or, does it??

Wall art in the ladies’ room

If you build it, they will come….now the Meow Wolf parent company is the entertainment industry’s only certified Class B organization. That means their corporate charter includes provisions to give back to the community and to provide living wage jobs for artists of all sorts, and who come from all walks of life.

You might be wondering where the name Meow Wolf comes from. I was wondering about that…apparently the founding artists all wrote two words on slips of paper and put them in a hat. The first two words taken out of the hat were Meow and Wolf and thus Meow Wolf was born. (Sounds about right)

This was by far the busiest day of our trip to date. In addition to Meow Wolf, we visited the Roundhouse (the state capitol building of New Mexico), the Georgia O’Keefe Museum, had lunch at the Plaza Cafe, window shopped Santa Fe, visited the Loreto Chapel and St Francis of Assisi Cathedral. Phew. Those photos in a future post. Tomorrow we head to Chimayo—stay tuned!