Meow Wolf plans fourth location in Washington
Expansion set to open in 2022 after Denver, Vegas launches
The Meow Wolf gang is at it again. The creator of the 2016 interactive art installation House of Eternal Return on Rufina Circle now has its eyes on Washington, D.C., after earlier this year announcing projects in Denver and Las Vegas, Nev.
Meow Wolf announced its third expansion Tuesday, with the expected opening in 2022 of a three-level, 75,000-square-foot permanent art installation in the northeastern D.C. neighborhood of Fort Totten.
Meow Wolf is partnering with the D.C.-based Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation, which approached the Santa Fe arts collective about launching an immersive art project there. The foundation describes itself as “the largest private, independent, local foundation focused exclusively on the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area.”
In the meantime, Meow Wolf is in the groundbreaking phases in Denver and Las Vegas.
“There is no limit to how many more installations we want to do in the future,” said John Feins, Meow Wolf ’s
vice president of communications. “What our appetite and capacity is, it’s difficult to say. We are so focused now on Denver and Las Vegas.”
Meow Wolf CEO Vince Kadlubek, in a recently released documentary, Meow Wolf: Origin Story, said what began as a local arts collective is now a $50 million company with the potential to be a billion-dollar operation.
Meow Wolf Las Vegas is the anchor tenant of the new 40-acre Area 15, a “radically reimagined” retail, art and entertainment complex, as described by its developers. In Denver, Meow Wolf is building a triangular structure between two viaducts in the Sun Valley community, south of Mile High Stadium.
The Las Vegas site is expected to open in December 2019 and the Denver site in December 2020, Feins said.
Meow Wolf said it will reveal more details about its D.C. project in the new year. For its Washington installation, the arts group will follow the dynamics of its projects in Denver and Las Vegas, where staff sought out underground art scenes to recruit local workers.
“We always recognized untapped and uncelebrated culture of young people who are not going to get a show at the National Museum of Art,” Feins said.
Meow Wolf, with 400 employees, has 150 people directly involved with the Las Vegas project and another 150 involved with developing the Denver installation. Feins said Meow Wolf wants at least 40 percent of the artists working on the Denver design to be based in the city.
“If Denver ends up at 80 percent, that would be fine,” he said.
The D.C. Meow Wolf will be the anchor of the second phase of Cafritz’s Art Place at Totten Park, a mixed-use development. The first phase, in 2007, included the construction of 520 apartments in three six-story buildings, with about 100,000 square feet of groundfloor retail. Plans for the second phase call for about 250 more apartments, a small grocery store, a children’s museum and about 50,000 square feet of additional retail space.
Before the Denver expansion, Meow Wolf representatives had been nosing about the city for years, and eventually word got out to the Denver do-it-yourself underground art scene, Feins said, adding, “They embraced us.”
“Denver had an underground art scene that was under duress,” he said. “We knew a community of talented artists we could tap into and put to work.”
Meow Wolf ’s House of Eternal Return gained immediate international media attention, including stories in the Guardian of London, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, upon its March 2016 opening.
The New York City-based Fisher Brothers development firm behind Area 15 in Las Vegas and the Cafritz Foundation both sought out Meow Wolf, asking the company to bring its immersive art to their cities.
“Meow Wolf has grown beyond the innovative DIY art collective to a nationally renowned, immersive art experience,” Jane Cafritz of the Cafritz Foundation said in the Meow Wolf news release. “This opportunity will be an important addition to Washington, D.C., and the northeast DC. As a team that has been involved in the arts for decades, we are thrilled to see that the future of the art experience will be coming to the nation’s capital.”