Other Worlds Just Like This One: Enchantment at Meow Wolf’s “The House of Eternal Return”

Santa Fe, New Mexico is one of the most iconic cities in the United States, devoted to its distinctive architectural image. Meow Wolf (MW), a Santa Fe–based art collective that began in 2008, has gained widespread attention for their acid-dipped large-scale immersive installations because their first permanent location opened in their home city in 2016. This article interrogates what ideals the attraction depends on and unwittingly encourages, integrating architectural history, cultural, and ethnic studies, to challenge MW’s self-narration against their flagship product in a close reading of the attraction itself, blending ethnographic description, art reviews, and journalism. This article situates MW within a longer history of New Mexico’s tourist image and considers the relationship between artists and how we imagine or script fantasies about place.