It was gray and drizzly in Houston — a perfect day to be sucked into an alternate universe.
A mysterious statue of a bearded man encrusted head to toe in pastel shells, barnacles and other sea life caught the attention of two visitors. One of them, a young boy, uttered a few words into a microphone, and suddenly the creatures began to pulse and glow. A symphony of chirps, squawks and sounds reminiscent of whale songs and pipe organs resonated through a forest of neon-colored coral.
Lisa Hlavacek, 35, and her 3-year-old son, Arthur, were visiting Radio Tave, the latest immersive art exhibition by the group Meow Wolf. It was Ms. Hlavacek’s sixth visit since it opened last October.
Meow Wolf, which began in 2008 as a loose collective of artists in Santa Fe, N.M., has grown into a pop culture phenomenon with five permanent installations and more than three million total annual visitors.
As visitors explore Meow Wolf sites, ducking through secret doors and experimenting with different objects, they unravel mysterious back stories, discovering clues, hidden places and more than a few surprises.
A movie-themed Los Angeles site is scheduled to open next year, and the group has announced plans for a New York location (set to include an “otherworldly arcade”) in late 2027 or 2028.
Ticket prices vary, but average around $50 for adults and $37 for children. Plan to budget at least two hours for your visit, and once you’re inside, don’t be shy.
“The best way to experience Meow Wolf is to embrace the unknown with curiosity and an open mind,” said Erin Barnes, a company spokeswoman.
Here’s where you can jump into a Meow Wolf dimension:
Santa Fe, N.M.
At House of Eternal Return, Meow Wolf’s first permanent exhibition, visitors rummage through a suburban home whose fictional owners have inexplicably disappeared, learning from documents like letters, a diary and a newspaper that its residents developed bizarre powers, including the ability to speak with plants and hop between dimensions.
Opened in 2016, the 20,000-square-foot location is the smallest permanent Meow Wolf exhibition, installed in a former bowling alley with financial assistance from the author George R.R. Martin, known for fantasy novels like “A Game of Thrones.”
After crawling through a clothes dryer door into a short tunnel leading to a room full of lost socks, Bruce Thomson, a public relations consultant from Cheyenne, Wyo., said exploring the house felt like a welcome respite from reality.
“If you surrender yourself to it and don’t mind looking like a fool, it’s a wonderful experience,” he said.
Las Vegas
A surreal supermarket called Omega Mart aims to subvert consumer culture and satirize modern marketing with aisles full of perplexing products, some bolted in place, others available for purchase — offerings have included brands like Gender Fluid sparkling water, Who Told You This Was Butter? (an air freshener spray) and Nut-Free Salted Peanuts (a seasoning mix).
Opened in 2021 as the second Meow Wolf location, Omega Mart is an anchor attraction at the entertainment complex Area15. Omega Mart’s 52,000 square feet contain 60 distinct sections, ranging from a deli case stocked with tattooed chickens to a surveillance wall with 24 screens showing live feeds from around the exhibition, created by more than 325 collaborators, including the psychedelic painter Alex Grey and musician Brian Eno.
Denver
The third and largest Meow Wolf exhibition, Convergence Station, explores the collision of four alien worlds that merged in an imagined cosmic cataclysm. Visitors roam a “quantum transit hub” housing 90,000 square feet of wormholes and portals spread across four levels, exploring the mysteries flowing between the four interconnected worlds.
For $3, travelers can buy an optional QPASS — a public-transit-style tap card — that stores collected “memories” (a.k.a. story elements) for review either on a website or at on-site “Memory A.T.M.s” that present visual charts showing how they are connected to each realm.
“Each new space we entered had a bunch of different little, fortune-cookie-style things to explore and unravel,” said Bryant Hall, 46, a bank executive from Ouray, Colo., who took his daughter, Grace, to Convergence Station for her 12th birthday. They especially enjoyed poking around a pontoon boat that served as a research vessel for cryptozoologists hunting the Yawlp, an elusive, garbage-eating monster that suffers from social anxiety.
Grapevine, Texas
The Real Unreal, a 28,000-square-foot location near Dallas, focuses on the story of a young boy who goes missing after following a strange creature. Visitors explore the boy’s home, searching for clues to his disappearance. They are soon transported to the Real Unreal, an alternate universe full of bizarre life-forms like Melvy, an alien cephalopod who travels through sewer pipes to emerge from a powder blue toilet in a bathroom decorated with floral wallpaper.
Other way points in the Real Unreal include Carnivorous Caverns, filled with sentient, hungry plants, and the Baba Yaga Hut, home to a witch who may either help or eat wayward children.
Houston
Radio Tave, a realistic but ersatz 30,000-square-foot radio station transported to another dimension (“tave” means to hop dimensions in Meow Wolf-speak), focuses on auditory effects and melodic soundscapes. Visitors can make their own sounds using conventional instruments like bongo drums in the station’s recording studio or unexpected interfaces such as small statues of imps or an elaborate control panel that is home to a lost, now digitized, house cat that will meow and purr if you push the right buttons.
It also includes the marine-life-covered bearded statue that delighted Ms. Hlavacek and her son, which, it turns out, was the manager of the fictional community radio station before he was pulled into the alternate reality, a plot element that anchors the story of Radio Tave.
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