Meow Wolf — which runs a psychedelic string of immersive art exhibits across the country — has announced plans to build its first East Coast outpost, at Pier 17 in the South Street Seaport neighborhood of Manhattan, with an opening set for 2027 or 2028.
“There is big ambition here,” Vince Kadlubek, one of the company’s founders, who holds the title of chief vision officer, said in an interview. “There is a joyful pressure, the kind of pressure that creatives feel when you are reaching for something that is intending to be remarkable.”
He said New York would be the company’s largest investment in a single location, requiring tens of millions of dollars and collaboration between nearly 500 artists and designers to fill a nearly 50,000-square-foot venue. Meow Wolf is also partnering with Seaport Entertainment Group, which operates a food hall and concert venue at the site.
“The biggest evolution for us in the New York project is the level of connectivity between the exhibition and the participant,” said Kadlubek, explaining that he wanted visitors to feel like they are inside a video game where their choices might influence the world around them. He added that the main sources of inspiration for this new location were immersive theater performances like “Sleep No More” and a Brooklyn night club called House of Yes.
Meow Wolf started in 2008 as an art collective running on a shoestring budget in Santa Fe, N.M. But over the past decade, it has transformed into one of the largest immersive art companies in the world, employing nearly 1,000 people to run the sites, dripping in neon paint.
The “Game of Thrones” author George R.R. Martin was an early investor in the company, supporting its “House of Eternal Return” installation in Santa Fe. Kadlubek and other founders had projected that yearly attendance would be about 125,000 visitors; instead, they received that many in the first three months. Over the first year, the company said, “The House of Eternal Return” made three times its projected revenue. Today, Meow Wolf welcomes nearly three million visitors annually across all its locations.
Beside its five permanent locations — new sites in New York and Los Angeles (coming next year) will make seven — Meow Wolf has also expanded into merchandise, amusement park rides, television production and video game development.
Kadlubek said that planning for New York started about three years ago. The company was emerging badly bruised from the coronavirus pandemic, when lockdowns forced its venues to close as executives abandoned plans for two ventures and cut nearly 200 jobs. Meow Wolf then hired a new chief executive, Jose Tolosa, who led a restructuring plan, which included two more rounds of layoffs in 2024 and an effort to diversify revenue so the company could become less reliant on ticket sales.
“The hardest lesson that we learned is that you never know what’s going to happen,” Kadlubek said. “Covid forced us to think about Meow Wolf as an ecosystem of creative partners that at the core is a team here in Santa Fe.”
For an artist collective from a smaller city, making a splash in New York is intimidating. Meow Wolf will be competing not only with other immersive art venues like Mercer Labs but with major cultural institutions on Broadway and Museum Mile.
