The Meow Wolf art collective will open a 400-room hotel.
An installation at Meow Wolf in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Photo by duluoz cats, via Flickr.
Meow Wolf, the Santa Fe-based art collective known for its eye-popping—and Instagram-friendly—installations, is pivoting into hospitality. Last week, Meow Wolf announced plans to open a hotel in downtown Phoenix, which will have some 400 rooms designed by local artists, 75,000 square feet of exhibition space, and a 10,000-square-foot performance venue. The thematic, artist-customized rooms, per an official announcement, will include all of the following: faux-glamping sites, hostel-like spaces, “absurd luxury suites,” and accomodations within the art in the main exhibition space.
In a statement, Meow Wolf CEO and co-founder Vince Kadlubek said:
Guests are always asking about staying overnight inside of our House of Eternal Return project in Santa Fe, so doing an intertwined exhibition and hotel just made sense to us. [...] Our intention for this venture is to collaborate with the creative community in greater Phoenix to produce an authentic, local statement of expression which will bring further excitement and creative energy to the Roosevelt Row Arts District.
Image courtesy Meow Wolf.
The hotel project, a partnership with Phoenix-based development firm True North Studio, is just the latest of several Meow Wolf projects in the works. Late last year, the collective announced plans for an outpost in Washington, D.C., and it is slated to open locations in Las Vegas later this year and in Denver next year. The new Phoenix art hotel project does not yet have a projected opening date, but is described in Meow Wolf’s announcement as “a multi-year project.” It promises to be a distinctly maximalist approach to the art hotel concept, as opposed to the white-cube aesthetic of the 21c Museum Hotel, which has a string of art-filled hotels throughout the south and the midwest.
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