“Meow Wolf.” If you said it out loud a decade ago, you would probably have gotten a lot of concerned looks from family and friends.
But today, this artist collective based in Santa Fe, New Mexico has become a well-known creator in the themed entertainment design space with three permanent art installations spread across the American West. Meow Wolf’s three explorable installations – The House of Eternal Return, OmegaMart, and Convergence Station – are totally immersive, explorable environments; potential puzzles with discoverable backstories and vast lore; trippy, artistic, home-grown, artist-led, locally-sourced, completely-original universes designed for visitors to get lost, climb, slide, dance, relax, feel, and try something new.
Founded in 2008 as an artist collective lead by Matt King, Meow Wolf formed with the hopes of filling Santa Fe with alternative art and, eventually, constructing a music venue. (If it sounds like they randomly pulled two words out of a hat to form their name, that’s because that’s exactly what happened.) Several high profile art installations and shows (like 2011’s “Glitteropolis” cityscape, 2012’s “OmegaMart” fake grocery store, and 2013’s “Nucleotide” cave installation in Chicago) set the stage for Meow Wolf’s first permanent installation. And that’s where our tour begins…
But be warned: so much of Meow Wolf’s three permanent installations need to be experienced to be understood, and some of the quieter corners and hidden rooms in each are best left unspoiled… So if you intend to visit any of these locations, we’d recommend you tread lightly and avoid videos or walkthroughs of the experience. If you do press on in this feature, just know that we’ll share images of popular and well-documented aspects of each site and explore their basic stories and regions, but leave plenty to the imagination…
House of Eternal Return (Santa Fe, New Mexico)
The first of Meow Wolf’s permanent installations resides in the collective’s home town of Santa Fe. One pretty continuous refrain you’ll hear about the New Mexican Meow Wolf site is that it really is the “Disneyland” of its genre – the first. Quite literally establishing the standards of the “immersive art experience” that’s been often duplicated since in increasingly-elaborate form, so much of this first Meow Wolf is almost charmingly understated and naive.
For example, you could pass right through Santa Fe’s Cerrillos Road business corridor without even knowing that a bucket list destination for themed entertainment fans is there. There’s no giant upside-down WonderWorks mansion. Instead, this first Meow Wolf is located in an abanadoned bowling alley (secured, in part, by a $2.7 million plege from George R. R. Martin – author of the Song of Ice and Fire fantasy series that was adapted into Game of Thrones) off the main strip. (The attraction’s sign even repurposes the former inhabitant’s – still shaped like a bowling pin.)
The only things that betray the otherworldly experience that resides inside are a number of gigantic art installations – like a spindly arachnid, a metallic coyote, and flower-sniffing robot – that are dropped down like landmarks in the parking lot.
Inside resides the ubiquitous box office, a small cafe, and a gift shop. But upon entering the installation – House of Eternal Return – you’re transported someplace very different.
Once inside, guests find themselves in the front lawn of a beautiful, two-story Victorian home in Mendicino, California. You can linger on the front porch. Look in through the windows. Listen for conversations between the neighbors through a fence. Search the mailbox for message sent to the Selig family and read it for your. Or, of course, you can head into the house. And that’s where things get weird.
Sure, this house has all the rooms you’d expect – a parlor, a study, a kitchen, bathroom, bedrooms, closests, and more – but something extraordinary is hidden inside. It turns out that this home was affected by something known only as the Anomoly – an inexplicable event that tore through the house, ripping open fractures in time and space and transforming the unassuming home of the Seligs into a multiversal crossroads.
You could spend hours pouring over the diaries of the Selig’s daughter; sifting through drawers; investigating puzzles, and exploring the connections within the house that ultimately establish an origin for the Anomoly, and motives for the shadowy governmental agency that’s placed the house in quarantine.
But for most guests to Meow Wolf, the path to discovery a lot less heady. It’s through the fridge.
Actually, dozens of unexpected breaks in the space-time continuum exist throughout the home. From room to room, folds in the fabric of existence create unusual sights and sounds. But more importantly, those wrinkles occasionally break into full on portals.
Crawling through the fireplace leads to a day-glo fish tank where you’re the fish. Shuffling through clothes in the childrens’ closet deposits guests into crystal caves where the glowing skeleton of a mammoth can be played like a xylophone; the fridge leads to the headquarters of interdimentional travel agency Portals Bermuda, which then links onward to secret gardens, ice stations, and deserts…
Even the laundry room has an unexpected connection to another world… it’s just inside the dryer, if you’re willing to climb in.
Eventually, nearly all of the mini-worlds within Meow Wolf lead to the Forest – a glowing, multi-story woods, spiral staircases, drawbridges, hidden habitats, living plants, and more. You can rest in its grassy hills, or ascend through the Forest’s illuminated canopy discovering ever more connections to new rooms, interactives, oddities, art pieces, and routes back into the house itself, unveiling unexpected links between our world and this one.
It would be easy for even the most avid explorers to miss an endlessly dark room lit only by an interactive laser harp; a black and white room decked out in the details of a 1920s Fleisher cartoon; dioramas of the Selig’s pet hamster, who’s been unexpectedly hurled into the comedy and chaos of the multiverse. Catch the “Wilderness” room alone and you’ll have a transcendental experience creating music in real time surrounded in geometric, stylized folded-paper animals.
At the furthest corners of the universe resides Fancy Town – a geometric cityscale that serves as the backdrop for concerts that use Meow Wolf as a venue.
The House of Eternal Return literally unfolds into increasingly elaborate, trippy, and otherworldly environments. The torus-shaped Timeworm (a sort of spaceship-esque room for relaxation); a vertical school bus to recline in; infinity rooms… even those who try to get to every nook and cranny are certain to find evidence online of rooms they never knew existed… It takes hours to absorb it all, and we’re intentionally going light on detail and imagery to preserve this experience for you.
And as evidence of just how wonderfully original, creative, and thoughtful Meow Wolf is, strong-willed are the few themed entertainment design fans who can make it through the exist gift shop without picking up a $3 copy of the “Mendo Mercury” – an entirely fabricated but immensely world-building fictional Mendocino newspaper whose stories expound on the mythology of the Anomoly and its effects on northern California. Talk about an in-house IP and world-building lore.
It goes without saying that in a post-Wizarding-World industry, increasingly immersive experiences are all the rage. But what Meow Wolf did with its 2016 House of Eternal Return installation is something new entirely… Truly, an artist collective, with various creators coming together to build dissimilar worlds connected by one overarching narrative. This is something different than what we’d seen before: a wholly original, fully-enveloping universe designed by free reign artists, powered by the local community, and explored at will. Mind-expanding, family-friendly, and heartfelt, Meow Wolf’s first permanent installation carved out a new niche in themed entertainment… all inside of an old bowling alley.
And in the same way that Disneyland “invented” the standards we hold modern theme parks to and inspired increasingly-ambitious spin-offs, the beautifully limited, charmingly naive, and lovingly developed House of Eternal Return went on to inspire two other permanent Meow Wolf installations with entirely different settings and storylines… Read on…
Meow Wolf’s first permanent installation – The House of Eternal Return in Santa Fe – was a 20,000 square foot immersive multiversal experience built by 200 artists in an abandoned bowling alley. But in 2018, the organization announced their plans for a second build-out… this one nearly three times as large at 52,000 square feet, 60 environments, and 325 artists involved.
Rather than being an off-the-beaten-path attraction as in Santa Fe, Meow Wolf Las Vegas would take up residence in a new, immersive, indoor entertainment complex for “Sin City” called Area 15. Residing among indoor zip lines, virtual reality simulators, psychedelic walkthroughs, the fabled Lost Spirits Distillery art show, and more, Meow Wolf’s second installation would take the shape of something entirely inoccuous: a grocery store.
OmegaMart (Las Vegas, Nevada)
“You Have No Idea What’s In Store For You” at OmegaMart – the so-called flagship store of the nationally-expanding grocery chain founded by entrepreneur Walter Dram. Proud of its “benevolent and irrepressible growth,” Walter’s daughter Cecilia now oversees the OmegaMart chain and the larger workings of its parent company Dramcorp.
Sure, Dramcorp’s dabbling in “Additive S” to its store brand products has a sort of nefarious, dystopian corporate air, but hey, it’s late stage capitalism! Why shouldn’t we try to “ascend” to the next plane of existence with a little help from our grocery chain of choice?
The most remarkable thing about OmegaMart might just be how unremarkable it is. Somewhere between a chain grocery store and a Midwest gas station, entering the experience really is like… well… going shopping.
The shelves of OmegaMart really are stocked with items that – for the most part – you really can purchase. (Hey, if you’re going to skewer consumerism, you may as well benefit from it, too!) But if you come to OmegaMart for your real grocery supply run, a closer look at the shelves may leave you feeling a little queasy.
Nearly every item on the shelves at OmegaMart is a blink-and-you’ll miss it parody ranging from otherworldly nonsense to hits-close-to-home meta-commentary.
From bottled “Vegan Goat Pus” to “Simply Spiders” cereal; lunchmeats that volleys somewhere between rancid and intergalactic; “Who Told You This Was Butter” room refreshening spray, “Nut-Free Salted Nuts”… Even the giant tub of cheese balls (marked “Fun Size” on a scale of “Fun,” “Compound,” “Party,” and “Armageddon” size) are Prepper’s Choice brand, with a gas mask logo, and a starburst icon signaling they’re “An Excellent Source of Orange” and double as “Official Currency of the Postwar Economy.”
The store’s most legendary sight must be its Dairy section where, mid-milk-carton, a seeming glitch in reality has stretched and elongated an entire section of wall and product into an abstract art piece.
Occasionally, the pleasant-if-bland elevator music begins to crackle as the stores overhead flourescent lights stream in shades of red, green, yellow, purple… Perhaps the only obvious signal that there’s more than just odd groceries to this exhibition. In fact, there are several ways to access the “behind-the-scenes” of OmegaMart, including a second floor “Employee Micro-Break Room.”
But most visitors’ first indication that there’s a whole lot more to OmegaMart than meets the eye is via the soda cooler. Frosty bottles clink as you swing open the door, but beyond an a narrow hallway that meanders through the icy refrigerator. The further you go, the more the glass bottles seem to warp.
It lets out in Seven Monolith Village – a desert town set in the grooves of a Technicolor slot canyon. Diving deep into the mythology of OmegaMart reveals the importance of this desert oasis, whose wellspring of water serves an important purpose in the overall story. But the projection-mapped canyon walls all around create an impossible atmosphere that’s a stark departure from the rigid, artificial store you begin in.
Likewise, further connections lead to the OmegaMart Factory – a multi-level space filled with catwalks, slides, conveyer belts, and watchtowers. This incredible, kinetic place clearly serves as the super-sized, industrial analog to the House of Eternal Return‘s central Forest – a literal, glowing, interactive playground right in the middle of the experience, just man-made rather than supernatural.
Finally – accessed via a secret locker entrance from the employee Breakroom on the second story of the store – is the headquarters of Dramcorp. This dystopian corporate office park is a dark, Black Mirror-esque environment of research labs, prototype testing, and even white collar offices where you can dig down into the “Transcendant Operations” and training regimine for Dramcorp “Factory Actualizers.”
It’s clear that OmegaMart supersizes the experience of the House of Enternal Return while maintaining its artistic integrity. Yes, OmegaMart is an experiential art installation, and a family-friendly attraction for Las Vegas. But it’s also smart. Wickedly smart. It’s funny and dark and clever.
And just as Walt Disney World built on the foundation of Disneyland, it’s more refined. There’s a greater level of certainty here than in the House of Eternal Return; a little more intentionality to the narrative connections between OmegaMart, the Village, the Factory, and Dramcorp Headquarters. You’re just as likely to get lost, of course, but the visuals and interactives and experiences here feel less like a fever dream and more like cohesive, complementary environments well-contained by a frame story.
OmegaMart really is an exploration. Just like the House of Eternal Return, it uses a grounding in our world to explore another. But it’s an entirely fresh world and story and a brand new corner of the multiverse to explore. Somewhat like an anthology series, the first two Meow Wolf sites are sort of “spiritual sisters,” drawn from the same realm of sci-fi, fantasy, and adventure even if they don’t narratively connect at all.
…Which might leave you wondering what awaits in Meow Wolf’s third (and to date, most recent) permanent installation…
After The House of Eternal Return and OmegaMart became respective destinations for artists, themed entertainment fans, families, road trippers, and otherwise trippers, it makes sense that the arrival of Meow Wolf in a third city would be a cause for excitement for many who are in-the-know…
But certainly, it makes sense that most people aren’t exactly sure what “Meow Wolf” is, does, or means. So when the organization set their sights on Denver, they entered the community in a very clever way…
Kaleidoscape (Denver, Colorado – Elitch Gardens)
Located right in downtown Denver on the South Platte River resides Elitch Gardens. At one time donning the Six Flags banner, Elitch Gardens is – by former Six Flags standards – a fairly small park, counting a Vekoma Boomerang and an SLC (above) as its headlining coasters.
It makes sense. Elitch Gardens is hemmed in by the river, downtown sprawl, and Ball Arena, where the Denver Nuggets play. Plans to redevelop the high-demand land the park occupies have been floated for years, and it’s expected that within the decade, Elitch Gardens will close for good.
When it does, its rides will likely be auctioned off, relocated to other Premier Parks properties, or – locals hope – moved to a new location in Denver (which would be the park’s second relocation. It only arrived at its current downtown spot in 1995 after having spent more than a century in the West Highland neighborhood).
But that didn’t stop Meow Wolf from using it as an unorthodox introduction…
In 2018, the park’s Ghost Blasters shooting dark ride closed for good. The Sally-manufactured off-the-shelf attraction was one of many similar installations to be found across smaller amusement parks, boardwalks, and family entertainment centers, as well as five Cedar Fair parks. In its place, Elitch Gardens welcomed Meow Wolf’s Kaleidoscape.
Designed by seven Denver-based artists as part of the Meow Wolf collective, Kaleidoscape brilliantly purposes the bones of a simple Sally spook house into a vivid, abstract, colorful explosion of visuals. Apparently, it’s meant to follow the journey of a single spec of light as it expands to become a planet-sized entity. In practice, guests are armed with ghost-blasters-turned-“Conglomatrons” able to condense objects down into infinitesimally small, dense points as they’re carted through the surreal environment.
True to form, the sights and sounds you’ll find in the void of Kaleidoscape are sometimes beautiful, sometimes trippy, sometimes startling, and sometimes all three at once. Meow Wolf’s artists even stripped many of the animatronics and effects leftover from Ghost Blasters and repurposed them in new ways.
Using those animatronics, effects, projection, blacklight, and music, Kaleidoscape easily becomes one of the most unusual dark ride experiences on Earth, giving Hard Rock Park’s legendarily-heady, ethereal, and trance-like “Nights in White Satin: The Trip” a run for its money.
If you doubt you’ll be able to make it to Elitch Gardens, it’s worth going full-screen on a ride-through this amorphous, abstract, unusual dark ride, sitting back, and letting it unfold before you without fast-fowarding through…
More to the point, it’s certainly one way to ingratiate yourself to the community and convey exactly what you’re about… And all of it lead up to the opening of Meow Wolf’s third permanent installation…
Convergence Station (Denver, Colorado)
Given its almost-ironic placement wedged into real estate typically viewed as unusable – in the negative space of a highway interchange – Meow Wolf didn’t play coy with its Denver location. In fact, the massive showbuilding structure is practically an icon presiding over the interchange of I-25 and I-70. (You can also find Meow Wolf on the larger map we used to show Elitch Gardens’ location on the last page!)
Probably not coincidentally, this Meow Wolf – wedged at the confluence of traffic heading north, south, east, west, and every direction in between – is Convergence Station. The largest Meow Wolf exhibition yet (90,000 square feet across 4 stories), Convergence Station invites guests not into a home torn asunder nor a dystopian grocery store, but a cosmic oddity.
Decades ago, during a supernatural event known as the Convergence, various dimensions accidentally overlapped, with sections of each clipped off from their own worlds and timelines. Residents of these unusual places were left stranded and wracked with “Memory Storms” that scatter their memories of their home worlds…
And now, QDOT (that’s the multiversal Quantum Department of Transportation) has linked Earth to their transit system between Converged worlds. But before boarding the C-Line to begin their exploration, visitors are warned that bouts of forgetfulness and amnesia may strike as they experience the Convergence, and to hold onto their memories if they can. After all, in the Convergence, memories are currency.
C Street
The Transit Station luckily serves as a central space from which stairs and elevators diverge to the different worlds of Convergence Station, but most visitors tend to hop aboard the C-Line TRAM (that’s Transmonic Rift Access Mechanism), which carries guests through the various layers of the Convergence, depositing them first in the central layer of C Street.
Apparently once the sanitation district of a planet-sized ecumenopolis, C Street has become a melting pot of cultures since it was clipped off from its homeworld. It’s a grimy-but-lively, colorful, cultural, and creative cityscape whose residents embraced the Convergence and their severing from a landlord-ruled city.
(A $3 QPASS tap-card that can used throughout the experience stores in-universe credits called “mems” gathered in each world. Those credits can be built up to unlock a larger mystery and mythology of the Convergence and four key residents of the worlds who went missing when it occurred, with a culminating experience for those who follow the narrative to its conclusion… So dipping into and out of converged worlds is essential…)
Though various streets, alleys, storefronts, and vehicles, C Street is a day-glo metropolis where elections are held every 20 minutes (to prevent capitalist dictatorship) and where alien languages and cultures converge. Guests can explore a Cyber Cafe, the “Orpheum Monoplex” theater, the “Aquakota” night club, and more. It also serves as the connecting point to the other three worlds involved in the Convergence…
Ossuary
Ossuary is an underground world carved into caverns – all that’s left of a planet that experienced a massive Cataclysm long ago. The vaults of Ossuary are filled with Oss – crystals capable of encoding all-important memories – and maintained by Librarians. Ossuary is an almost spiritual realm presided over by the current Librarian.
Dozens of experiential chambers reside throughout Ossuary, like a “Mongovoo Temple” serving as a “time machine” to ancient Mongolia, a “Parlor of Birds” recording memories of extinct species, and the ancient “Oss Caves” filled with glowing memory crystals.
The Hall of Busts builds out the history of Ossuary by commemorating its many Librarians as far back as the first speaker of the stones, Lyra, each recorded speaking The Tome of Forgetting.
Eemia
Eemia is a piece of a Kingdom torn from its homeworld. Built around the Cathedral (originally designed digitally to be part of a virtual reality experience at Burning Man in 2020), the story of Eemia is that of a family torn apart.
As told in the ice-encased Book of Whales, the kingdom of Eemia was a thousand years into an unending ice age when the Convergence occured. Kaleidogoth High Priestess Araceli desperately searches for a way to “open the sky” and save her civilization while her brother believes Eemia’s future is better served by remaining in the Convergence. Meanwhile, their mother is one of the “Forgotten Four” – a representative of each world who disappeared at the moment of Convergence, and may or may not be related to its happening…
By reviving the Eemian “mechs” encased in ice around the explorable Cathedral, guests who dig into the lore of the Convergence Station can actually sit inside the mechs and control them. When done correctly, they project a puzzle into the sky above the Cathedral that – when solved – opens and wormhole and activates a realm-wide effect.
Numina
The final overlapped world, Numina is a living, sentient world. Mother nature, embodied. Every plant, animal, and structure on Numina is part of Numina – organelles of the larger creature. Pulsing with energy and light, this storybook world is a swamp of light and life, populated with otherworldly creatures that share its sentience.
Wonderfully, this world is curious about us and our linear view of time. When beings with free will (like humans) make decisions, it makes a timeline split. As such, Numina is a world that reaches out, forming portals into microcosms and branching timelines. An aquarium room offers clues that divert guests into other universes to assemble a numeric pattern of yet-unknown consequence. A rainbow passage connects Numina to the chambers of Ossuary. The “Womb Room” contains a conversation pit for reclining and relaxing.
At the center of the swamp is the Cosmohedron – a living creature in its own right, plus the central nucleus of Numina’s living self. This shell-like organism contains several experiences inside, like an interior color gardens on the ground floor, a Frog Egg nest in the middle level, and an observation tower on the third.
By time your visit to Convergence Station comes to an end, you’ll have traveled through four distinct worlds, each entirely climbable, explorable, and discoverable. You may have even learned the origin of the Convergence, the “Forgotten Four,” and QDOT. But no matter how you chose to interact with Convergence Station and its residents, you won’t forget it any time soon…
The Meow Wolf Magic
Through its four overlapped worlds, its complete immersion, and its artist-led design, Convergence Station again reaffirms that Meow Wolf didn’t just invent a new genre of themed entertainment – they remain at the forefront of it. Like Disneyland, Walt Disney World, and Shanghai Disneyland, their installations in Santa Fe, Las Vegas, and Denver reveal fascinating learning in less than a decade; each iteration more ambitious, more committed to storytelling, and more completely out-of-this-world than the one before.
Maybe more to the point, though, Meow Wolf isn’t just a model for a new kind of immersive, experiential, regional entertainment formula and a “next generation” museum experience. More importantly, it’s also a captivating example of the power of investing in creativity.
Every world, story, and character you’ll find in the House of Eternal Return, OmegaMart, and Convergence Station is an “original” – the kind of world-building that we talk about, but rarely see, from major industry players like Walt Disney Imagineering and Universal Creative. This is what happens when artists aren’t just employed; they’re empowered.
Look at what can happen! Entire universes exist within our reach. These places can be made real. They can change our thinking and expand our perspective. They can inspire us and transform us. Just as many of us were shaped by early EPCOT or our first visits to Disneyland, generations will remember Meow Wolf as the spark of inspiration that taught them a new way of seeing, touching, hearing, and thinking.
The lesson to learn is simple: think outside the box. You just may find a portal in the fridge.
