Kwinton Gray, Will Heron and Katie Murray

The views and opinions expressed by speakers and presenters in connection with Art Restart are their own, and not an endorsement by the Thomas S. Kenan Institute for the Arts and the UNC School of the Arts. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

To describe Meow Wolf as an artistic juggernaut might not be entirely hyperbolic. Founded in 2008 by a group of Santa Fe-based artists looking to show their work outside of the traditional art ecosystem, the collective created its first permanent exhibition in Santa Fe 2016 when famed author George R.R. Martin pledged $2.7 million to purchase an abandoned bowling alley. Meow Wolf titled the installation “House of Eternal Return,” and the surreal, immersive, semi-narrative, multi-artist, multimedia and multi-room experience it provided quickly garnered many fans and repeat visitors.  Since the success of “House of Eternal Return,” Meow Wolf has opened several more gigantic installations: two in Las Vegas, one in Denver and as of July 2023 one Grapevine, TX, titled “The Real Unreal.” 

Meow Wolf continues to be artist-run and employs artists both in their headquarters in Santa Fe and also in the locales where they install their new exhibits. In order to understand the extent to which the company’s model of audience engagement and artist support might be a gamechanger nationally, “Art Restart” interviewed three Texas-based artists who contributed their talents to the creation of “The Real Unreal.”

Kwinton Gray is a composer and sound designer based in Dallas; Will Heron, also based in Dallas, is a graphic designer and muralist; and Katie Murray is a painter and muralist based in Fort Worth.

Choose a question below to begin exploring the interview:

• Would each of you describe your specific contribution to the most recent Meow Wolf experience, “The Real Unreal”?
• What’s the company’s process for identifying and hiring the local artists? How can you make sure you don’t in some way upset the artistic ecosystem that’s already there and leave out crucial people? How do you make sure that the company remains respectful of the artists who’ve already made a living there?
• Can you describe the process of getting the commission? What were the guidelines you were given?
• You’ve probably done work for hire, contract work … can you talk about how this in any way felt different?
• Can you talk about how you think your art is being received by the audience in a way it hasn’t been in other situations?
• I like to talk about artists who are breaking the status quo and reinventing ways to bring their art to their audience … how you think Meow Wolf is breaking some rules?
• How has your experience working on this in any way shifted the way you’re viewing your own career moving forward? Have there been any important lessons about your art or your career? What have you learned?
• What current or upcoming projects are you particularly excited about on each of your ends? 

Pier Carlo Talenti: Would each of you describe your specific contribution to the most recent Meow Wolf experience, “The Real Unreal”? 

Will Heron: I’m the artist liaison for Meow Wolf Grapevine. I’m a local artist here in North Texas. I was hired by Meow Wolf back in Spring of 2022 just to act as a liaison between the creative community that already exists here and Meow Wolf, which is a Santa Fe-based company that’s building their fourth permanent exhibit here in our region. I worked with all these amazing artists, sound artists, visual artists to help make the exhibit real.

They offered me this role because of the community work I do. I run a mural festival here in West Dallas, and I do a lot of curatorial work besides my own personal art practice of muraling. They hired me on just to act as this liaison as someone who’s embedded in the creative community already in this region. A lot of the work was just helping be that middleman, boots on the ground — cowboy boots, I guess, since we’re in Texas — for the company that’s not based in Texas.

Pier Carlo: Katie, what was your contribution to this installation?

Katie Murray: Han first emailed me, I think, around the same time in 2022, although it feels so much longer ago, as somebody to source some of the artists locally. I have a local art nonprofit and was asked to put together a spreadsheet of local artists to contribute, with the hope and intention of possibly getting to paint a room myself, which is what I did get to end up doing.

Pier Carlo: That was not the original contract?

Katie: Right, right. It started with the sourcing, and then I got lucky enough to paint.

Pier Carlo: Would you describe the room that you painted?

Katie: Sure. I am upstairs just off of The Forest. Will, you’ll have to correct me because I don’t know that I will remember any of the names correctly geographically within Meow Wolf. It is a figurative piece of local entrepreneurs and some of my friends from Fort Worth. It’s portraits as an ode to my friends and family and patrons and entrepreneurs of Fort Worth.

Pier Carlo: Kwinton, could you describe your work on this project?

Kwinton Gray: Yes. I was hired to be a sound artist and composer for the exhibit. The music I created was very heavily tied to the storyline. 

Pier Carlo: Could you describe what that means?

Kwinton: Han reached out to me about composing jazz music.

Pier Carlo: Who’s Han?

Will: Han Santana-Sayles is the Director of Artist Collaboration. She’s my boss. She’s our curator for the whole company of artists we work with.

Pier Carlo: Gotcha. Thank you. OK, Kwinton, so Han reached out to you?

Kwinton: Yes, on Instagram actually. [He chuckles.] Honestly, I didn’t know much about Meow Wolf at the time, other than some friends of mine who had been to the Santa Fe location. 

The music I created for the Dallas location is a compilation of jazz music throughout different decades, from the ‘60s to the ‘90s. I did about 12 songs or so for the exhibit.

Pier Carlo: Twelve original pieces?

Kwinton: Twelve original pieces, yes.

Pier Carlo: Wow. That’s amazing.

Kwinton: All live band, all live musicians playing on it.

Pier Carlo: Each piece representing a different era in jazz history?

Kwinton: Along those lines, yeah. About eight of the pieces are grouped together in a jazz-fusion ‘80s/‘90s era. Four of the pieces are more like ‘60s/‘70s jazz quintet.

Pier Carlo: What strikes me about Meow Wolf is that it’s not based in L.A. or New York or Miami. It’s based, in this case, north of Dallas, and it ends up hiring a ton of local artists, which I love. 

What’s the company’s process for identifying and hiring the local artists? How can you make sure you don’t in some way upset the artistic ecosystem that’s already there and leave out crucial people? How do you make sure that the company remains respectful of the artists who’ve already made a living there?

Will: I think Meow Wolf is huge about collaborating with local artists, as you’ve already mentioned. It’s definitely part of the ethos of a company as a whole. Grapevine is the fourth location we have. Santa Fe is the first, Denver and Vegas are the second and third, and then we have North Texas being the fourth and Houston coming up next year. I think a big part of that for them is not coming into a region or a creative community without doing their research and without knowing exactly what they’re coming into. It’s why they hire people like me. It’s why they hire consultants like Katie back in 2022, talking to the artist community, the theater community, the sound community about what’s going on in that region before they even start to dream up who they want to work with.

Then after doing all that research, it’s really about identifying who are the artists they hope to work with that have the vision, the esthetic that matches with Meow Wolf, and then figuring out how they can provide opportunities to those different types of artists to be a part of the exhibit. It’s very intentional. It’s a years-long process of this research. 

I think they’ve been working on the North Texas project since about 2018, so really investing in research. We have a database of Texas artists they’ve been working on that’s 500-600 artists deep throughout the state of who they could have possibly worked with. They’re really being intentional about their research and who they’re wanting to connect with before ever even starting construction or signing a lease on any building.

Pier Carlo: Kwinton, given that you created an entire soundscape for this piece, can you describe the process of getting the commission? What were the guidelines you were given? 

Kwinton: They actually gave me a lot of freedom to absorb the storyline after they let me know more about the storyline —

Pier Carlo: The storyline. This might be a question for Will. Was the storyline already in place before you were hired?

Will: Correct. Storyline is almost one of the first things we do for any of our exhibits. They have a writer named LaShawn Wanak that we’ve worked with since 2018 to write the baseline story of the family that lives in the house in our exhibit. That’s the starting point for, I think, everything in the exhibit.

Pier Carlo: Do any of the local artists, let’s say in and around Grapevine, have any say in the direction of the story?

Will: They do not. That’s all done internally. About half of the exhibit, I would say, is made by Santa Fe creatives; the other half is made by these local collaborators. That’s how we balance out art from the region versus art from Santa Fe and the internal company.

Pier Carlo: OK, great. We will come back to that. Sorry, Kwinton, back to you then.

Kwinton: LaShawn created an amazing storyline. As I read the story and got immersed into it, I had pretty much freedom to just create what I heard and create what I felt and create what the storyline inspired me to write. 

There was feedback, as well. I would send in stuff, and they’d be like, “Maybe a ballad, maybe this, maybe that.” I’d be like, “OK,” and I’d send in something else. But at the same time, it worked pretty well, just us collaborating back and forth. They just let me create whatever I wanted. It was a definitely amazing experience, just working with a company that I felt and feel works with artists and know that they really value artists. I never felt any kind of negative pushback. It was all positive.

Pier Carlo: As somebody goes through the exhibit, do different rooms have different sounds?

Kwinton: Will could probably answer this better, but there’s a lot of different sound artists as well for this exhibit. I’m one of many artists who created the sound for the entire exhibit.

Pier Carlo: Katie, could you talk about the moment you were given the go-ahead to paint the room and what that process was like?

Katie: When Han did send me that email, I truly thought it was spam. I thought somebody was faking me out, like I’d won the lottery and “Hey, guess what? It’s Meow Wolf,” and I’m like, “No way.” 

Because I had never been to a Meow Wolf. After experiencing both Denver and Santa Fe now, I would describe my original proposal as a little stiff, just not as playful and fun as it ended up being for the final draft. But what was great is we had so many phone calls and Zoom meetings to collaborate a little better with the vibe of Meow Wolf. They were able to help me out and express very kindly and helpfully how to not recreate but just change up my design so that it fit in esthetically a little bit better.

Will: Katie’s one of our Fort Worth superstars. We have representation, I think, of all the cities and of the entire state, with artists representing different parts of Texas. Katie is one of our two Fort Worth … I won’t call you a celebrity, but [in a singsong voice] celebrity!

[Katie laughs.]

Will: Just being able to show off what Fort Worth art is, especially the subject matter being Fort Worth people. I think it’s really important that people who drive into Grapevine from Fort Worth see parts of themselves in the exhibit, and Katie definitely offered that with her room.

Pier Carlo: Wait, you have artists from all over Texas represented in this exhibit?

Will: Yeah, so I would say we have 40 technical artist collaborators. We had six interns. We had people who got hired on with the temporary team with Meow Wolf. But out of our 40 collaborating artists, a bunch of them are North Texas — Dallas, Denton, Fort Worth — but we also have Austin, El Paso, Houston. We got a bunch of variety of Texans in the mix.

Pier Carlo: Will, I want to go back to what you were saying. Is half of the exhibit actually built or planned in Santa Fe?

Will: A lot of the exhibit and its parts are built in Santa Fe and then shipped over to the site. We have rooms that are built by many hands that we call anchor spaces. You’ve heard Katie talk about The Forest, or we have The Alleyway or The house in the Front. Kwinton designed the sound for The House in the Front. A lot of these anchor spaces are built by many hands from the artists in Santa Fe, versus the other half of the rooms are the smaller or different-sized flex spaces. These are where one artist controls the whole space, mural, sculpture, sound design, light design, everything in between. That helps divvy up how that 50/50 is with the Santa Fe artists who work for the company. Their job is to work in Santa Fe on these art pieces. Then they come to Texas for six months to finish building out the exhibit with the Texans. Now, those Santa Fe artists are moving on to Houston after this, while our local collaborators are getting back to their own studio practices here in North Texas.

Pier Carlo: Kwinton and Katie, you’ve probably both done work for hire, contract work, so I’m wondering if you can talk about how this in any way felt different.

Katie: Sure. This was a project that we had to sign NDAs, we had to keep secret for almost a year. That was new for me, to a certain extent. That was number one. And then this is an artist-based collective, and I think it was a lot different working with people who understand the process of making art, as opposed to a firm or corporate entity hiring out.

Pier Carlo: [Laughing] Although it’s funny, as soon as you said you had to sign an NDA, suddenly it didn’t sound like an artist collective anymore. It sounded like a corporation.

Katie: Oh, I know, I know. I’m always impressed when artists can also be professional business people, something that I work on very hard. But no, I think it was just a fun environment too. The people that you get to talk to and collaborate with and work around when you’re on site, it was just fun and visually stimulating.

Pier Carlo: Kwinton?

Kwinton: Yeah, I completely agree. I think from the beginning it felt like you were doing business with somebody who valued the art that you can create and valued your art as much as you did. It was like, “Wow.” Usually as a writer or as a musician, an artist, we get bad business deals all the time, as far as recording contracts and different things. It was just refreshing to know that it was business but they were willing to listen to you and they valued the art that they wanted you to create. Yeah, truly a different experience.

Pier Carlo: Can you talk about how you think your art is being received by the audience in a way it hasn’t been in other situations?

Kwinton: I think that because of the big collaboration of artists that this exhibit is, everyone gets to pick and choose how they experience your art because they experience it while looking at something else or while ... There’s just so many things going on that change, I think, the way people can experience your art. It’s really cool for me to know that people are always asking me, “Where’s your music? Where’s your music?” I’m like, “It’s throughout the house. Just check around.” But if they don’t check around, they’ll have a completely different experience than somebody who really wants to find the music.

Pier Carlo: Katie?

Katie: Yeah, I love that, Kwinton. That is such a great way to describe it. I don’t know that I truly put it all together that way, but it’s true. You are getting to experience, when you’re in a room … . Some people have said they are overstimulated to a certain extent. It just depends on who the person is. But yeah, you have the lighting effects and the music and the visual that you see. 

I think for me, what’s different is also the exposure. This is a whole different group of people who may not have seen my work before, because the audience is so broad, especially being in Grapevine Mills Mall. Me too, I have friends who are like, “Where are your room? Where’s your room?”

Pier Carlo: It is a working, existing mall?

Katie: Yeah.

Pier Carlo: Wow. Do you sometimes get spillover, like “I was just shopping at Dillard’s, and ‘Hey, what’s this about?’” Does that happen?

Will: Absolutely! Or “We were at the Lego store,” or “We were at the food court, and what is this Meow Wolf thing?” For sure.

Pier Carlo: That’s wonderful. 

Katie: Grapevine Mills is unique because it’s more of an experiential mall anyways. I have a feeling that’s what mall life is just going to turn into because people aren’t shopping in malls anymore. There are a lot of other experiential places within Grapevine Mills that I think help root Meow Wolf. It doesn’t feel like it’s floating because it’s experiential in and of itself.

Pier Carlo: I see. Well, experiential feels so crucial to this. Theaters are shutting down, for instance, because people can just be entertained passively at home by streaming. It feels like the future of art has to be in some way experiential and radically different from what you can experience alone in your living room. 

I like to talk about artists who are breaking the status quo and reinventing ways to bring their art to their audience, so I’m wondering if each of you can talk about how you think Meow Wolf is breaking some rules.

Will: Definitely. I think the internet, I think Instagram has changed the way people see and experience art. I think Meow Wolf is just providing a new setting to be able to experience immersive art, mural art, sound art, any of these different types of art in a new context. I think they’re breaking some of the rules of what “gallery or museum art” is or should be, taking it out of the white wall, velvet ropes, needing tickets and needing to understand the rules of a museum or gallery. It’s taking it totally out of that context and putting it in an old bowling alley in Santa Fe or putting it in this outlet mall in north Texas. It’s giving the same caliber of art and creativity to the public but in a different context and maybe a more approachable context, especially for younger audiences.

Pier Carlo: Kwinton, what about you?

Kwinton: Just like Will said, it is fresh. It’s not stale. It’s so vibrant. Just the experience alone, people walk by it, and they have to stop and wonder, “What is that?” Even if they don’t know anything about it’s just this... The experience itself is so really, really awesome. Like Will said, it’s easy. You don’t need printed-out tickets and all this stuff. You just show up, and then you can experience the exhibit however you want.

Pier Carlo: What’s the entrance fee?

Will: There’s a range. I think 12-and-under tickets are now like $20 all the way up to … . I think you can do an all-day pass where you don’t have to pick a specific time. That’s at like 50 bucks, so the range is $20 to $50.

Pier Carlo: Katie, what about you? What rules do you think are being reinvented?

Katie: Every rule from a traditional art standpoint, because it’s rare that you get to be in a space where you get to view 40-plus artists plus a whole collective showing their murals in one space that is permanent. It’s not going anywhere and can be revisited in air conditioning, which is so nice to have for a Texas activity. 

Also, I think their care and attention to the diversity of artists that they collected and are representing was very intentional and thoughtful, and I applaud them for that. I think that can be hard and is rare to find sometimes. I think people are attempting or saying that they are working on diversity, but I think Meow Wolf puts it in practice.

Pier Carlo: How has your experience working on this in any way shifted the way you’re viewing your own career moving forward? Have there been any important lessons about your art or your career? What have you learned? Kwinton, you want to start?

Kwinton: Honestly, just that the main thing is to be serious. Be serious about what you believe in and take yourself seriously. I love collaborating. It’s one of my favorite things to do, and this experience only has ignited me to want to continue collaborating and even more so continue to fight for what I believe in and —

Pier Carlo: Which is what? Can you say more about that? 

Kwinton: Just about, more so really talking to artists about just believing in your intellectual property and your creativity and yourself and your mind and your value and trusting that the opportunity is enough validation. The fact that you’re here is enough validation. You don’t have to constantly seek validation; just continue to do the work.

Will: Love that, Kwinton.

Katie: Hm-hm.

Pier Carlo: Katie, what about you?

Katie: I think for me, it showed a higher level of art and project that I want to continue to stay with, in terms of, I guess, the size and just the importance to the work itself and to the artist, as Kwinton was saying. I think it pushed me to maybe take more larger jobs and maybe less of the smaller ones, even though they’re all important, to focus my energy towards projects of this size and caliber, as long as they’re coming in.

Pier Carlo: Will, what about you?

Will: I think it’s probably twofold for me. One is specifically on my artwork. I think working with this company the last year and a half has really made me consider more installation-based work than maybe I previously have been making. A lot of my work is either mural work or 2D drawing and painting or sculpture, and I don’t need to be “or” all the time. I can actually combine all of these realms together in my practice, which a lot of the Santa Fe artists have taught me. 

When we can work together on a big project, like a big immersive-art exhibit, I think one of us rising up to the occasion is actually all of us rising up to the occasion, where we’re all elevating each other’s standards and elevating each other’s art by working together and bouncing ideas off each other and creating new stuff collaboratively that maybe we wouldn’t have on our own in our studio by ourselves.

Then more in my artist-liaison role, I just think it only deepened my belief, as Kwinton mentioned, in collaboration and the power of collaboration. And how when we can work together on a big project, like a big immersive-art exhibit, I think one of us rising up to the occasion is actually all of us rising up to the occasion, where we’re all elevating each other’s standards and elevating each other’s art by working together and bouncing ideas off each other and creating new stuff collaboratively that maybe we wouldn’t have on our own in our studio by ourselves.

Pier Carlo: Which then makes me want to ask, how has this exhibit affected the community of artists in North Texas as a whole? Is it instigating other collaborations?

Will: Definitely. We’ve already done some group art shows together.

Pier Carlo: Really?

Will: We were a cohort of 40. I was already close to a bunch of them, and now it’s like I can’t imagine not knowing all 40 of these artists before last year. Yeah, just realizing how small our creative community actually is with how connected we all were already. Now we’re even more connected through this process, and hopefully it won’t be the last time we get to work together.

Pier Carlo: Katie or Kwinton, are you planning any collaborative projects with any of the artists you worked with on this?

Kwinton: Yeah, I am actually. Just like Will said, I knew some of the artists beforehand but definitely have met and connected with a lot of artists who I knew about but never really connected in person. Yeah, it’s definitely created a lot of different relationships, and I’m looking forward to collaborating with a couple of different artists here in the near future.

Pier Carlo: That’s very cool. Katie?

Katie: I work for a developer, and we have a mental-health initiative event every November. Because of Meow Wolf, I felt comfortable enough to reach out to two of these artists and have them participate in our art auction. That was a really cool and special.

Will: Love it.

Pier Carlo: That’s awesome. Then I would like to talk about what you’re working on, not necessarily with Meow Wolf. What current or upcoming projects are you particularly excited about on each of your ends?

Kwinton: I’m currently doing a musical in Dallas called “The Rocky Horror Show.” I’m music-directing this musical, and we’re right now in tech rehearsal and dealing with a lot of different things, with laws happening as far as drag and different things in Texas. But we are still putting on this production, and I’m very excited about it. This is my first music-director gig at this theater, which is a theater I’ve worked at many times, just not as a music director. Yeah, that’s pretty much what I’m doing right now for the next two months. 

Then I’m working on my next solo album, which is all instrumental fusion with a total of about 12 tracks that are being mixed and mastered right now.

Pier Carlo: Awesome. Will?

Will: Staying busy. I got a couple murals coming up here in Dallas over the next couple of months. That’s just personal art practice stuff. I have a group show at the end of the year at one of the galleries around town. Then Meow Wolf-wise, there’s always a thousand things to be moving forward with. We have a learning center onsite at Meow Wolf that we are finishing up currently. 

Pier Carlo: Oh, so your work is not done with Meow Wolf?

Will: It is not. I’m still staying on board with Meow Wolf and getting to be a community connector. 

Pier Carlo: What is the learning center?

Will: We’re building out a learning center that will be where we can have student groups and artist talks onsite, just as a 60-person capacity space outside, but inside the exhibit. Yeah, that’s one of my current Meow Wolf things. We’re working on the RFP for another local artist to become a collaborator with us and paint up the learning center so it is a beautiful colorful muraled space for when the students start coming in January. 

The work is never done. Then we’ll start upgrades in the next year and a half, and there will always be things to keep people coming back to Meow Wolf.

Pier Carlo: God, it makes me think of the student who experiences it and thinks, “Oh wait, I can be this kind of artist,” whereas she might’ve never had that opening into that possibility before.

Will: 100%. I was a public-school art teacher for 10 years before my full art career, so education and art education is definitely one of my pillars in life. It’s exciting to work for a company that also believes that.

Pier Carlo: That’s great. Katie, what’s on your plate?

Katie: I have a whole list of murals that I need to start working on. 

Pier Carlo: Congratulations.

Katie: Oh, thank you. I really want to just take a vacation and a nap. This has been a busy year, but I’m thankful and grateful.