Meow Wolf’s millionth
Art collective celebrates milestone
Education does open doors, after all.
Seven Deming children, ages 9 to 15, were surprised by their parents with a trip to Meow Wolf in Santa Fe last weekend as a reward for earning good grades during the school year.
And then Meow Wolf doubled down.
As Raul Longoria, his partner, Kimberly Garcia and their children arrived at the ticket counter on Rufina Circle, the clerk explained that she needed to speak to her supervisor about a computer problem, said Longoria, 41, a home health care worker.
Suddenly, he said, a group of Meow Wolf employees emerged, “cheering and yelling.”
The clerk, before she disappeared, had mentioned something about a million visitors, Longoria said.
“It was pretty intense and unbelievable at the moment,” he said Friday. “It was like a dream.”
Just two years, four months and three days after it opened, Meow Wolf welcomed Longoria, Garcia, 38, and seven of their children as the millionth visitors to the immersive art exhibit, the House
of Eternal Return, said John Feins, Meow Wolf vice president for communications.
The interactive arts and entertainment installation attracts nearly a half-million visitors every year — twice what its creators hoped it would draw just to keep the doors open, he said Friday.
“I can’t say I’ve researched other art installations or immersive art experiences,” Feins said. “I don’t know there are many attractions doing the numbers we’re doing. Not many places are seeing the kind of traffic we’re seeing in New Mexico.”
Meow Wolf is counting on even larger attendance numbers when it opens planned installations in Las Vegas, Nev., in 2019 and in Denver in 2020. Each is a metropolitan area with many times the population and visitors of Santa Fe; each new installation will be about three times the size of the original, Feins said.
Among the visitors Meow Wolf is counting on are Longoria and Garcia, who left town with passes to the openings in Las Vegas and Denver, gift certificates, lifetime passes to Santa Fe and other prizes. Longoria said members of his family were already repeat visitors when they arrived at the
gate Monday.
Garcia and her two youngest daughters, Natalia and Alivia Longoria, visited earlier this summer with Garcia but, because they traveled with the girls’ grandmother, didn’t see all there is to see at Meow Wolf at the time, Longoria said. Their stories about the place excited the other children.
Longoria decided to reward them all with a trip for their hard work and good grades this year. The children attend schools in Albuquerque, Las Cruces and Deming, he said.
“I wanted to plan a trip and not let them know we were going,” Longoria said. Also on the trip were Daniel Fletcher-Jones, 15; April and Alex Garcia, both 13; Raulito Longoria, 15; and Angel Longoria, 12. An eighth family member, Caleb Cowart, 19, had to work that day and didn’t make the journey.
After the 300-mile drive to Santa Fe, the family on Sunday visited the Loretto Chapel — which receives about 200,000 visitors annually — and the Railyard, Longoria said.
“The main event was Meow Wolf,” he said.