We have the right stuff for artistic success

LAS CRUCES – When I walked into the House of Eternal Return, Meow Wolf’s Santa Fe sensation that’s attracting international raves and enthusiastic crowds, there was a sense of déjà vu.

It was a unique experience (read more about it in today’s SunLife section) but I couldn’t shake the notion that I’d had very similar surrealistic adventures back home in Las Cruces.

Later, I realized that I’d visited and written about another Meow Wolf installation called “Glitteropolis” that ran from late 2010 to early 2011 at the NMSU Art Gallery.

And my memories drifted back to earlier times, at imaginative, interactive Las Cruces experiences with sophisticated multimedia storytelling adventures, mazes and participatory mystery dramas and  assorted weird and wonderful Alma d’arte and NMSU art student antics.

I thought about our Broadway-caliber costume and set designers, playwrights, and actors, award-winning filmmakers, fiestas and museum reenactments, brilliant conceptual performance artists, dancers, and musicians, all right here in my own querencia.

When I interviewed artist Noah MacDonald, July 10 Artist of the Week, I remembered his creative installations in Santa Fe, and his project with an old adobe in Mesilla, a kind of ruin-preservation, resurrection-through-artistic-documentation project.

And my mind leapfrogged back to the 1990s, when I first met Georjeanna Feltha. She recreated her childhood home, in an otherworldly, richly-textured version incorporating tattered fabrics and molten wax, in evocative rooms at an installation at the NMSU Art Gallery.

My first such experience came even earlier, when Myriam Lozada-Jarvis, Kelley Hestir and other imaginative regional artists created ArtForms (a nonprofit artists’ organization that spawned February For the Love of Art Month). Artistic adventures abounded in the group’s early years, from an art car parade to multimedia banquets and what strikes me now as a mother of a Meow Wolf experience. In what was then called a “happening,” artists transformed an old house somewhere on the Lohmador corridor into a sophisticated interactive art experience accessible for just one night.

Over the last month, I’ve been pondering Meow Wolf’s phenomenal success story and wondering if it could happen here, and why it didn’t happen here first. Actually it did, in many forms, as already noted. Las Cruces is a kind of moveable Meow Wolf feast, and has been, for a long time.

So what does Santa Fe have that we don’t have? Meow Wolf was clearly in the right place at the right time. The name value of “Game of Thornes” creator George R.R. Martin, who reportedly kicked in $3.8 million to buy an old bowling alley and fund the project, the support of businesses and other investors and the city of Santa Fe, were crucial factors, of course, along with international media attention focused on Santa Fe’s rep as an art mecca.

In the end, was it the passion of the young artists who experimented and hung together?

“A lot of artists’ collectives get in fights and a lot of collectives burn out,” long-time Meow Wolf member Golda Blaise-Pickett told me. “But no matter how tiffy we got, we always came back to our vision for a special world. Santa Fe needs us and we stuck together.”

We have passionate, energetic young artists, too, who’ve founded their own galleries and enterprises. And passionate, high-energy, middle-aged and downright vintage artists, who’ve kept the faith for many decades and accomplished remarkable things.

We have the talent and the visionaries. Could we find the right place, the funding, the investors, the celebrity name(s), the city backing and the persistent, artistic souls to create our own enduring, interactive, innovative, artistic phenomenon that would both employ and attract millennials and art lovers of all ages?

If we built it, would they come, and keep coming and stay awhile to appreciate the other wonders of our territory?

What do you think? Let me know, and I’ll do my best to unite our creative collaborators with like-minded souls.

S. Derrickson Moore may be reached at 575-541-5450, dmoore@lcsun-news.com or @derricksonmoore on Twitter.