![]() The union is asking that Meow Wolf underpin its innovative, bohemian aura with strong protections and higher wages for its employees. A new CEO from ViacomCBS was announced in January, joining a former Disney executive and a Utah-based Goldman Sachs alum in the company’s top three positions. It has managed to keep its reputation as a progressive leader in arts and entertainment, even as its former CEO moved into real estate development and despite a high-profile intellectual property dispute with one artist the company worked with. Still, Meow Wolf is unique among these contemporaries-it’s a much younger company that grew very quickly, and it isn’t a nonprofit. With an upcoming ratification vote hoped for in March, the Meow Wolf union joins a wave of worker organizing at cultural institutions around the country, including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Guggenheim, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music (whose organizers offered advice to the fledgling union at Meow Wolf). Partially in response to Meow Wolf’s stratospheric growth, its employees organized, and in October 2020, the company voted to recognize the Meow Wolf Workers Collective, an affiliate of the Communications Workers of America. In its place the gift shop expanded, sprawling across the lobby. The Learning Center-a space for community meetings and free programming, like story time-once immediately to the left, was shuttered indefinitely during the early days of the pandemic. Push through the double doors at the end, and the real world rushes back: a hallway, signs to the restrooms, vending machines. ![]() To exit the House of Eternal Return, a visitor walks through a neon coral forest in a person-sized aquarium. What was once a ragtag collective has become a multimillion-dollar company sitting squarely at the intersection of art and capitalism-and the competing pressures are obvious. Last year, Meow Wolf opened two new exhibits in Denver and Las Vegas. The trippy installation opened to the public in the spring of 2016 and was a near- overnight sensation: 500,000 people visited in 2019. Ordinary household fixtures-a refrigerator, a washing machine, a fireplace-became portals to a vast wonderland of colorful art and thousands of interactive objects. Meow Wolf started as an art experiment on the industrial edge of Santa Fe, New Mexico, in an old bowling alley transformed into a place called the House of Eternal Return.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |