did an installation with over 80 gold, waving lucky cat fi gures and it blew my mind. Soon after, I started making assemblage sculptures. In 2011, I got a job for Urban Outfi tters building the art installations for the store in Albuquerque. That job gave me the space and the budgets to fall in love with installation art. I then began building large-scale immersive sculptures out of scrap material, found 2x4’s and fencing material, often using light and geometry as well. Do you have any advice for anyone starting out with installation art? Work with materials you fi nd interesting — there are a lot of materials online for free and trash is everywhere and unfortunately plentiful. Make work that you want to see in the world. Your vision rarely matches up with what you make, keep making! Your vision will eventually match. Find a mentor! Collaborate! Large-scale works are hard to produce alone. Most of all, have fun! If your art could talk, what would it say? “I’m feeling a little emotional today!” SOFIA HOWARD What do you do at Meow Wolf? My current job title with Meow Wolf is Senior Artist, but I have been involved since the build of House of Eternal Return, where I worked as a volunteer and then as part of the inaugural team of docents, as well as helping with Exhibit Maintenance. I do a plethora of diff erent things including painting, sculpting, making miniatures, and traveling to install and fi nish pieces onsite in our various exhibits. I have also done a fair amount of art direction and leading small teams to complete collaborative projects. I try to keep the playful spirit of MW that fi rst drew me toward it as a 14-yearold alive to the best of my ability through how I plan and execute my art. How did you get started in installation art and how have you grown in that medium? As a kid, I built fairy towns in my bedroom using scarves as terrain and blocks as buildings. I was constantly hot gluing popsicle stick houses and making Sculpey models with my best friend for my entire childhood and well into middle school. When I started high school at New Mexico School for the Arts (NMSA) in 2011, we went on a walking fi eld trip to see Meow Wolf’s installation The Due Return at the Center for Contemporary Arts Santa Fe. I had never seen art like that before, and it totally changed my beliefs about what art was and how you could make it. My fi rst serious installation project was for my senior project before I graduated from NMSA. It was an installation of my bedroom in a corner of the gallery complete with a bed, laundry and other personal belongings. I also suspended and displayed piles of prints of fi lm photos I had taken through the duration of my time at the school with dates and autobiographical captions. A Meow Wolf Founder came to our public opening and told me that my installation reminded him of The Due Return, which was the biggest compliment I could possibly receive at that time, and he invited me to come and help build House of Eternal Return, which I took him up on several months later. I never went to college so Meow Wolf has been my art school for the past almost nine years, and my work has been transformed and molded by the collaborative visions we bring to life. I have learned a ton of material skills, and I also learned that I love painting murals — which was a shock to me because I hated painting in high school. As I have made more and more work, I have realized that the process of making it is usually the most important and enjoyable part to me, rather than the fi nal outcome. The biggest lesson to me in my growth with this medium is that you can make literally anything you can dream of if you team up with friends who have diff erent skill sets than you, then work together and keep open minds about how it will transform. Do you have any advice for anyone starting out with installation art? Just start arranging by arranging items in your home, let every surface be an opportunity for a vignette. See how shape and color and form can speak to each other. Then get weird with it, and share it with as many or few people as you want to. Dioramas are a great container to practice installation in if you don’t have a lot of space to make something life-sized, just add a tiny person and suddenly it’s huge! Look into the vast and varied history of installation art, there are SO many diff erent approaches and Meow Wolf’s style is just one of millions. Visit your local natural history or nature and science museums, they often have installations and dioramas that someone or a team of someones worked hard on, let those inspire and inform you. Learn how to use an impact driver and drywall anchors correctly :) And don’t be afraid to fuck up, just own up to it when you do. That’s how you learn. If your art could talk, what would it say? “I am the product of the miasma of collective unconscious, a piece of the hivemind of everyone I have ever known, worked with, loved and missed.” There’s no one way to get started with your own installation art. The key is to try, by yourself, or with friends, where you get to discover the process. Therein lies the magic — building the idea, collecting items or media elements, piecing the puzzle together, and culminating in your own personal “wow” moment. You can make all that happen, you just have to take that fi rst step to start. If you need some additional inspiration or a little creative guidance — from mask-making to stained glass creating and more — try out one of our Meow Wolf Makers Workshops. Heck, you could even use one of the things you create IN your installation! KEEP YOUR EYES PEELED FOR A MEOW WOLF MAKERS WORKSHOP NEAR YOU: TICKETS.MEOWWOLF.COM/EVENTS
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