Photo by: Courtesy of Omega Mart/Meow Wolf
While Las Vegas awaits the much-anticipated 2028 opening of the Las Vegas Museum of Art, Meow Wolf’s Omega Mart at AREA15 offers a compelling reminder that art comes in many forms. Sometimes, it’s even disguised as a grocery store.
Step through the doors and you’re in what appears to be an ordinary supermarket. Shopping carts wait by the entrance. Fluorescent lights hum overhead. Product displays look normal at first glance, but look closer: The shelves hold Crying Onion Chips, Tattooed Chicken, something called Gender Fluid. It’s all absurd enough to be funny, but real enough to make you do a double-take.
This is Omega Mart, billed as ”America’s Most Exceptional Grocery Store.” And exceptional doesn’t begin to cover it.
Wander to the freezer aisle, where you’ll find a portal hidden behind the ice cream. Walk through those vinyl curtain strips and, suddenly, you’re somewhere otherworldly. Forget everything you know about what’s real and what isn’t. You’ve just stepped into a multiverse of glowing caves, reality-bending architecture and dimensions that shouldn’t exist.
Photo by: Courtesy of Omega Mart/Meow Wolf
Meow Wolf, the Santa Fe art collective that specializes in turning wild ideas into physical reality, built this 52,000-square-foot labyrinth as both art installation and detective story. Despite the seemingly random exhibits, there’s a narrative thread running through it all, centered on Dramcorp, a family-owned business specializing in what they call “nationally localized consumables.” But beneath the corporate speak lies something far stranger, and maybe even a little sinister.
As you explore Dramcorp’s offices, factory floors and research facilities, the story reveals itself in fragments. Computer terminals hold encrypted files. Hidden rooms contain mysterious artifacts. The deeper you venture, the clearer it becomes: Dramcorp has been harvesting something called “the Source,” a mysterious substance that appears to be the key to their products.
And the multiverse just got weirder: Through a collaboration with UNLV’s College of Fine Arts, Meow Wolf welcomed MFA candidate Dan Hernandez to contribute his own dimension. His installation, The Stupendous Intergalactic Interdimensional Trophy Room, occupies a hidden liminal space between the Deli Case and the Factory. Inside, you’ll find bizarre trophies, alien heads and mysterious mummified artifacts, all supposedly created by a rift from Dramcorp overusing the Source. It’s a pop-up within a pop-up, a temporary addition to an already surreal space. The installation vanishes in January, so see it for yourself before it’s replaced by whatever strange new chamber emerges from the Omega-verse next.
Photo by: Courtesy of Omega Mart/Meow Wolf
If all this sounds too weird to be true, what makes Omega Mart work is its commitment to its premise. It doesn’t just nod at being a grocery store; it is one, down to the shopping carts and price tags, right up until it isn’t. The corporate offices feel genuinely corporate, fluorescent-lit and soul-crushing, before they spiral into something else entirely.
This is where Las Vegas does art on its own terms: immersive, interactive, impossible to categorize. Omega Mart shows that the most memorable art doesn’t always hang on walls. Sometimes it surrounds you, inviting you to step through the frozen food section and into another dimension entirely.
3215 S. Rancho Drive. meow.wf/lvm
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