Meow Wolf & The Art of Belonging

The false hallway breathed around me, draped in sunless fabric that felt like the skin of some sleeping creature. The walls curved inward, spiraling through dimensions that defied the logic of ordinary space, and the rough textile reformed beneath my fingertips, coarse papier-mâché giving way to alien amber. Passages branching into senseless directions like the neural pathways of a dreaming god. Then the tunnel exhaled, opening into vastness, and there before me sat a full-scale wooden Fleut, impossibly landlocked, as if the sea had surrendered one of its children to this interdimensional gallery.

I had never witnessed anything like this vessel torn from maritime logic and abandoned in a landscape that existed somewhere between time and prophecy. I moved along the hull like a pilgrim approaching a shrine, palm pressed against slivered wood, peering through voids where planks had been stripped away to reveal hidden compartments, each one a universe apart from the whole. The ship breathed with stories I couldn’t yet comprehend.

Finding the starboard entrance, I boarded The Due Return and surrendered myself to its maze of chambers: interactive art bleeding into secret passages, storied histories whispered through hidden doors, the entire structure pulsing with the kind of ordered chaos that mirrors the way dreams construct themselves. Three flights above the alien terrain, the ship’s bridge commanded the space like a watchtower, complete with flight deck and space capsule, as if someone had decided that maritime adventure and cosmic exploration were merely different expressions of the same essential hunger.

It was early May 2012, only months since I had drifted into Santa Fe like debris washing ashore. An hour earlier, I had wandered through the doors of the 6,000-square-foot gallery at the Center for Contemporary Arts, unprepared for the way Meow Wolf’s Due Return would rewrite my understanding of what art could accomplish.

My relationship with Meow Wolf differed from those who discovered them after they emerged as a national phenomenon. For those of us who arrived in Santa Fe in the tender years following their 2008 founding, they existed as something more elemental than an art collective. They were cartographers of possibility, architects of belonging. They didn’t just create installations; they created community. Their VFW dance parties functioned as small-scale, psychedelic electro-soirées where strangers became conspirators under varicolored lights, where the simple act of moving your body to unfamiliar rhythms could dissolve the carefully constructed barriers between who you were and who you might become.

Vince Kadlubek, one of their founding visionaries, once observed that “We are living in a crisis of imagination.” What better antidote than cultivating behaviors of acceptance through the gifts we carry but rarely dare to unwrap? Those dance parties were laboratories of the soul, experiments in radical openness disguised as weekend entertainment.

When The Due Return opened its wooden hull to evening events, the gallery transformed into something unprecedented. A venue where you could stand on the deck of an impossible ship with a beer in your hand, listening to A Hawk and a Hacksaw weave their melancholy through the interdimensional air, watching familiar sounds take flight on an alien planet. Those moments exist in my memory like pressed flowers, perfect, preserved, aching with their own impermanence.

One autumn afternoon that same year, I felt a magnetic pull of something extraordinary drawing me from my casita toward the plaza downtown. Rounding the corner in front of Ortega’s jewelry store—the same corner where I’d once collided with Willem Dafoe like characters in someone else’s story while he filmed Odd Thomas. I discovered a gathering of monsters near the plaza’s obelisk. It was Meow Wolf’s fourth annual Monster Battle, their reigning dance-off where costume became liberation, where becoming someone else allowed you to discover who you’d always been.

The Monster Battle understood something profound about human nature: that we often need to wear masks to remove them, need to become others to find ourselves. Hundreds of us shed our daily personas like snakeskins, letting our inner children emerge blinking into the Santa Fe sunlight, finally unafraid to be seen.

As Meow Wolf began expanding their reach, I found myself orbiting their gravitational field, offering whatever skills I possessed to their Las Cruces installation: Glitteropolis, I think it was called. My experience overseeing marketing for a Canyon Road gallery felt inadequate compared to their vision; however, I was desperate to contribute to this collective that had welcomed me into a foreign city with such generous open arms. As a writer, I struggled to see how my art could serve their mission, but marketing became my offering, my small way of tending to something larger than myself.

I watched them grow like time-lapse photography: from VFW dances and Monster Battles to the massive scale of The Due Return, to their first permanent installation, The House of Eternal Return, then expanding into Las Vegas and Denver with Omega Mart and Convergence Station, respectively. By the time I left Santa Fe in 2015, they were transforming from a local phenomenon into a national force.

When I returned in 2021, Meow Wolf had become something else entirely. Successful beyond their wildest early imaginings, but success had required sacrifices that no one could have anticipated. The intimate scale that had made them essential to the community had necessarily evolved into something more industrial, more distant. Santa Fe had changed too, becoming increasingly dependent on its presence while somehow losing touch with its essential spirit.

The city I returned to felt like a photograph of itself: beautiful but somehow emptied of its original vitality. Santa Fe had always been a place where art wasn’t decoration but oxygen, where culture flowed through the streets like an underground river. Meow Wolf hadn’t just reflected that culture, they had harmonized with it, created coherence from chaos, united what seemed ununitable. In their absence, or perhaps in their transformation from intimate collective to global enterprise, the city had lost part of its essential rhythm.

Years after leaving, I returned with friends from Texas to experience The House of Eternal Return, walking through halls that opened onto a suburban two-story home with a picket fence and half-acre yard, impossibly housed within a renovated bowling alley. We wandered through rooms, thick with narrative: documents and letters that sketched the outline of some greater mystery, before following other pilgrims down the chute of the family’s washing machine, sliding into a world that existed beyond the boundaries of description.

The exhibit pulses with the kind of magic that George R. R. Martin recognized when he invested in their vision, his generosity making it possible to purchase that abandoned bowling alley and transform it into something that defied every assumption about what art could accomplish. Martin’s faith in their imagination became the foundation for their permanent revolution.

I haven’t yet made a pilgrimage to Omega Mart in Vegas or Convergence Station in Denver, and they’re already constructing another permanent exhibit in Grapevine, Texas, scheduled to bloom in summer 2023. One afternoon at The House of Eternal Return, it feels like sipping from an ocean. There are storylines to follow, mysteries to unravel, and entire worlds waiting to be explored.

If you find yourself in any city where Meow Wolf has planted their flag, make time to wander through their ordered chaos. Be prepared: the experience doesn’t just alter perspective, it rewrites the very architecture of wonder, reminding you that imagination isn’t a luxury but a necessity, that art isn’t decoration but transformation, that the distance between impossible and inevitable is often just a matter of believing that the ship you’re standing on was always meant to sail through interdimensional space.