Santa Fe-based Meow Wolf will create two new permanent installations in Houston and Grapevine, Texas, which is part of the Dallas metropolitan area, the company announced Wednesday morning.
The first of the exhibitions to open will be at the Grapevine Mills mixed-use development. It will open in 2023 and has yet to receive a name, which the company said will be announced at a later date.
Houston's Fifth Ward neighborhood and historic district, located roughly two miles northeast of Downtown Houston, will open the following year.
A news release from Meow Wolf names "The Deal Co" as a development partner for the project.
"In Grapevine, we’ll be leaning into the energy of a shopping center — a nostalgic place for many of us, where families gather and young adults often find their first moments of freedom. In Houston we’ll engage a burgeoning arts community in the most diverse city in the nation," Meow Wolf executive creative director Dale Sheehan said in a prepared statement.
Artists local to Texas as well as artists in New Mexico will help create the new exhibits, according to Meow Wolf, which said it will begin recruiting artists and other staff this summer.
A representative for the company was unable to be reached for immediate comment Wednesday morning.
Meow Wolf got its start in Santa Fe back in 2016 with the House of Eternal Return. The company later opened exhibits in Las Vegas and Denver. The company announced its three locations have had more than 3,000,000 visitors.
The expansion would bring the company's total number of planned exhibits back to four after two similar projects were announced only to be shelved. Back in 2019, Meow Wolf announced plans for a 75,000-square-foot exhibit with a 400-room hotel in Phoenix. Two years later, in a statement attributed to the company's Office of the CEO, the company confirmed was sidelining a hotel concept.
Meow Wolf then said it "reevaluated" its original plan for an exhibit in Washington, D.C., adding in a statement that "we are looking at several options as to what an exhibition in DC will entail."
Nowadays, Meow Wolf looks a lot different. Vince Kadlubek stepped down from the CEO role in 2019, making way for a trio of executives — Carl Christensen, Ali Rubinstein and Jim Ward — to take the lead. The C-suite changed again when Jose Tolosa, a former ViacomCBS exec, was named CEO in January.
In a statement, Tolosa said that "opening a permanent exhibition in the largest and one of the most diverse states in the country has been on Meow Wolf’s radar for years."
