Meow Wolf

Meow Wolf’s Santa Fe installation is called House of Eternal Return, and it fills a former bowling alley at 1352 Rufina Circle, in a light industrial stretch southwest of the Plaza. You walk into a full-scale two-story house. Then you walk out of it again through the fireplace, or the refrigerator, or a closet, into somewhere the house does not account for.

What Is Inside

The building runs to about 33,000 square feet, roughly 20,000 of it exhibition, with more than seventy rooms and passages. The house at the center belonged to the fictional Selig family of Mendocino, California, who have disappeared. Their furniture is still in place, and so are their letters, photographs, notebooks, and refrigerator magnets, all of which can be picked up and read. Something went wrong in the basement. The rest of the building is what went wrong: a neon forest, the rib cage of a mastodon you can climb inside, corridors that change scale as you move down them.

There is a story, assembled out of documents scattered through the house, and it can be followed closely or ignored entirely. Most people do some of each. Almost nothing is roped off and almost everything is meant to be touched, which is the real difference between this and a museum. Children treat it as a playground. Adults tend to spend longer on the paperwork.

Where It Came From

Meow Wolf began in 2008 as a Santa Fe artist collective working in borrowed and temporary spaces, without hierarchy and with very little money. House of Eternal Return was its first permanent work. The building was Silva Lanes, a defunct bowling alley. George R. R. Martin, who lives in Santa Fe, bought it and leased it to the collective, committing roughly $2.7 million toward the purchase and the build. More than a hundred artists and fabricators worked on it for about two years, and it opened on 17 March 2016.

What followed is the part that locals find most striking. The company has since opened permanent installations in Las Vegas, Denver, Grapevine, and Houston, each considerably larger than the first. Santa Fe became the prototype for a kind of exhibition that did not previously exist. The original is still the smallest and by some distance the densest.

Practical Notes

It is a fifteen minute drive from downtown and not a walk. The space is loud, dark in places, and busy at weekends and on school holidays, so a weekday morning is a different proposition from a Saturday afternoon. Allow two to three hours, and more if you intend to read anything. The complex also holds a music venue, and that calendar runs separately from the exhibition. If contemporary art is the reason for the trip, SITE SANTA FE, the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, and the galleries of Canyon Road are the other three stops.

Common Questions

What is Meow Wolf?

Meow Wolf is an artist collective founded in Santa Fe in 2008. Its Santa Fe work, House of Eternal Return, is a permanent walk-through installation of more than seventy rooms built inside a former bowling alley on Rufina Circle.

When did Meow Wolf open in Santa Fe?

House of Eternal Return opened on 17 March 2016, after about two years of work by more than a hundred artists and fabricators.

Did George R. R. Martin fund Meow Wolf?

He bought the disused Silva Lanes bowling alley, leased it to the collective, and committed roughly $2.7 million toward the purchase and the build.