Santa Fe’s art collective plans permanent Denver installation
A portal to another world is cracking open near downtown Denver.
Meow Wolf, the collective responsible for Santa Fe’s immersive art exhibit called the House of Eternal Return, will open a permanent installation in Denver in early 2020. The $50 million, reality-wrinkling playhouse will rise 30 feet above the Interstate 25, Colfax Avenue and Auraria Parkway viaducts that wrap it on three sides.
It’s the first step, Meow Wolf CEO Vince Kadlubek said, in transforming the doit-yourself group into a nationally known name.
Meow Wolf plans to announce expansions to three other major markets across the U.S. in 2018. It has been scouting cities including Austin, Texas; Washington, D.C.; Oklahoma City; Minneapolis; Las Vegas; and Los Angeles.
“This term ‘major market’ has been a really important term for us,” Kadlubek, 35, said. “We’ve been living by this term. Denver is the major market that we’re going to.”
The project, tentatively titled Meow Wolf Denver, is slated to open at 1338 First St. in Denver’s Sun Valley neighborhood, just minutes from Elitch Gardens and a short stroll from Sports Authority Field at Mile High. The deal was brokered with Revesco Properties, which with Second City Real Estate
and Kroenke Sports & Entertainment purchased Elitch’s in 2015. A warehouse and an office building once used by Elitch’s will be razed when construction begins in the third quarter of 2018.
City Councilman Albus Brooks, whose district includes Sun Valley, said he hopes the presence of Meow Wolf will lead to further investment in entrepreneurial art projects.
“It’s a big day for artists and a great day for downtown Denver for us to be able to land it,” he said. “This is going to be the gift that keeps on giving.”
Meow Wolf signed a 20year, $60 million lease on the building, the largest deal in its decade-long history. Just seven years ago, Meow Wolf’s top brass were fashioning art installations from shoplifted Christmas lights and hauls from the trash bin.
“The big question is, can this art collective maintain its character while it’s growing into this multibillion-dollar company?” Kadlubek said. “If we can, then we’re going to be a cultural movement.”
Meow Wolf Denver will be similar to the Santa Fe space, although more ambitious. It, too, will include an immersive narrative experience designed to transport its patrons through the looking glass. Santa Fe’s House of Eternal Return offers the mystery of the Selig family, whose home has become riddled with portals to other universes.
Denver’s concept is being kept under wraps for the time being, but work on the exhibit was underway in mid-December in Santa Fe.
Steelworkers, carpenters and artists focused their efforts on what has been dubbed “the cathedral,” a two-story, kaleidoscopic chapel that will host a 32note pipe organ haunted by a gang of gargoyles and other creatures. Sparks flew as a welder worked on its dome, which will be flanked by two spinning spires that scatter light through 2,000 square feet of stained glass.
Standing four stories tall and including a total area of 90,000 square feet, Meow Wolf Denver will feature an exhibition space triple the size of the Santa Fe space. It will also have a bar, cafe, retail space and, notably, an 800-seat music venue.
“Santa Fe was a hobby in a lot of ways compared to this,” Kadlubek said.
Meow Wolf execs surveyed nine locations — including The Denver Post’s old printing plant at 4400 Fox St. — during a yearand-a-half hunt for a Denver location. RiNo was too hipster. Globeville was too far away.
The Sun Valley location — a triangle-shaped parcel in the shadows of the highway — didn’t jump out at first, either.
“I think it’s going to be one of the most interesting buildings in the United States when it’s done,” Meow Wolf co-founder Corvas Brinkerhoff said. “Because almost everybody else would see that and go, ‘That’s not developable.’ We see that and we go, ‘That’s interesting.’ ”
The choice to settle in Sun Valley could be a turning point for one of Denver’s poorest neighborhoods.
Meow Wolf will join the $65 million Steam on the Platte development — a mixed-use project that will bring condos, a Lyft headquarters and a restaurant/ brewery to Sun Valley — taking shape on the other side of Colfax Avenue. Last year, Sun Valley received a $30 million grant from the federal government that will go toward developing 750 units of mixed-income housing, parks and an education hub in the area.
Meow Wolf spurred transformation in its native neighborhood, Santa Fe’s Siler Rufina Nexus. Once a no-go for out-oftowners, the Meow Wolf Art Complex planted the seeds for a burgeoning business district.
In May, the New Mexico Economic Development Department estimated that Meow Wolf could represent a combined direct and indirect economic impact of more than $1 billion over the next 10 years.
“What they did that others haven’t been as successful at is they didn’t put it in the heart of Santa Fe,” Santa Fe Mayor Javier Gonzales said. “That’s the exciting part. It really broadened the scope of where tourists will go in Santa Fe. That whole district now around Meow Wolf is ready to explode into some kind of art district.”
In rapidly changing Denver, a large out-of-state entity — even one with BCorp certification and backing from “Game of Thrones” author George R.R. Martin — coming into a low-income neighborhood is bound to raise concerns.
Kadlubek admitted that when Meow Wolf initially opened in Santa Fe, the art community felt threatened. But ultimately, he said, it elevated the scene.
“We want Meow Wolf Denver to be this economic engine that, if it’s as profitable as we think it can be, can go toward supporting all types of existing and new types of programming art in Denver,” he said.
Last year, the company made $8.1 million in revenue, turning $3.3 million in profit, Kadlubek said.
Artists from Colorado and beyond have so far submitted 247 proposals for Meow Wolf Denver, according to Jessica Vradenburg, a Meow Wolf project manager. She didn’t say how many it would accept but said all approved projects would be compensated.
Merhia Wiese, a Denverbased business development project manager, said local artists’ response has been overwhelmingly positive, if a little incredulous.
“The adage ‘It’s too good to be true’ is definitely in the air,” she said.
Meow Wolf already supports arts outside of Santa Fe, last year donating $500,000 to organizations, including $70,000 to various Denver groups. An additional $30,000 flowed to improve Denver DYI and arts spaces in the aftermath of the Ghost Ship fire in Oakland, Calif.
Denver Arts and Venues deputy director Ginger White-Brunetti viewed Meow Wolf’s presence in Denver as a compliment to the strength and community of the city’s arts scene.
“That’s a recipe that Meow Wolf saw, and said this is where we want to be,” she said.
Given Denver’s population is eight times that of Santa Fe, Kadlubek doesn’t expect Meow Wolf to shake the artist community as hard as it did in Santa Fe.
From its humble beginnings as scroungers and spare-time creatives, Kadlubek said the collective began doing things “as right as we could” around 2010. It began to concentrate on its mission to empower artists and keep art viable to the public, renting a 2,000square-foot warehouse and raising money to write art grants.
Meow Wolf employs about 200 people, including the 135 recently added to prepare for its expansion. Once operational, Meow Wolf Denver could employ more than 300 people, Kadlubek said.
“Meow Wolf in Denver isn’t going to be everything to everybody, nor do we want it to be,” Kadlubek said. “We’re going to be this really prominent, really blatant thing right downtown, a very public-facing institution that is really thinking about kids and families most of the time.”