A note from Wild Card host Rachel Martin: I met Terry Tempest Williams about 25 years ago at a writer’s conference in Yosemite Valley. I was a young reporter who was there to do a story about how literature was addressing climate change and she made such a huge impression on me. I had never heard someone talk about the natural world the way Terry did and she had a spiritual depth I hadn’t encountered in my life at that point.

To this day, Terry’s writing always reorients me towards what is good, what is beautiful, and what is true. Her newest book is called “The Glorians.”

For its upcoming Los Angeles venue, experiential art firm Meow Wolf will focus on the art of storytelling, with a specific eye toward skewering our city’s moviemaking magic. To help bring that vision to life, Meow Wolf has entered into a creative partnership with Titmouse, one of L.A.’s most renowned independent animation houses.

The Hollywood-based studio behind popular series such as “Big Mouth” and “Star Trek: Lower Decks” will create animation that will be shown throughout the West L.A. venue, which is on target for a late 2026 opening at the Howard Hughes entertainment complex.

It’s a move that represents a shift for Santa Fe, N.M.-based Meow Wolf. Over the last decade-plus, the art collective has grown beyond its anything-goes, punk-meets-psychedelic roots into an organization with full-scale, maximalist installations in its hometown, Denver, Las Vegas, Houston and the Dallas suburbs. In the past, Meow Wolf kept most of its media in-house.

As part of its larger-than-life participatory art installations, Meow Wolf L.A. will feature a mix of live action and animation, the former filmed by Meow Wolf in its Santa Fe studio. Meow Wolf’s James Stephenson, a senior VP with the company and its creative director of emerging media, said the degree to which the L.A. exhibition will lean into various animation styles necessitated an outside partner. Titmouse’s work, in development by a number of directors with contrasting tones, will be shown on a variety of formats, ranging from cinema screens to full-room projections.

“I really believe in animation as an art form, and I know the Titmouse folks do too,” Stephenson says. “Animation is made by artists. It’s made by artists with their own hands. It’s something that is still very rooted in craft.”

Meow Wolf’s L.A. space is set in a former cinema complex, and will champion its location, taking guests on a journey through a converted movie house and beyond, into a sci-fi-inspired fantasyland with sentient spaceships and a 30-foot-tall mushroom tower. Meow Wolf creatives have spoken of the fantastical movie theater as one that will feature animated, self-aware candy before attendees enter the main exhibition space, making Titmouse’s work some of the first art guests will encounter. Titmouse co-founder Chris Prynoski has said the studio has lined up at least six directors for the exhibit.

Titmouse, says Stephenson, is the right partner because “they’re known less for a house style, and more for a house vibe.” Over the years, Titmouse has been behind such diverse shows as “Scavengers Reign,” owning a Jean Giraud influence rooted in French and Spanish surrealism, the lively “Jentry Chau vs. the Underworld,” with an unique color palette that took inspiration from anime and Chinese mythology, the exaggerated comic book feel of Adult Swim’s “Metalocalypse,” and the approachable yet expressive tone of “Star Trek: Lower Decks.”

“Meow Wolf’s vibe is similar to Titmouse’s vibe,” Stephenson says. “It’s artist-first, artist-driven, independent and kinda edgy. They are always trying to find the edge of what’s possible. They try to see how far they can go, and it’s done for fun and in the spirit of taking risks.”

Prynoski says working with Meow Wolf will give Titmouse a sense of artistic freedom it doesn’t always have when delivering content for more traditional Hollywood partners. He says the multi-director approach is a callback to the early days of Warner Bros. Animation, when individual creators put their own stamp on Looney Tunes material.

“I use Bugs Bunny as an example,” Prynoski says. “You’ve got a Friz Freleng Bugs Bunny short. You’ve got a Chuck Jones Bugs Bunny short. You’ve got a Tex Avery Bugs Bunny short. They’re all different versions of Bugs Bunny, and people who are really paying attention can tell which director directed each one. Even though to the layman, these are all Bugs Bunny, but if you lined them up, they are drawing in different styles, sensibilities and techniques.”

Prynoski says that was a centerpiece of his pitch to Meow Wolf, noting that characters will reappear in multiple installations, each handled by a different artist. Meow Wolf L.A., in fact, will be the firm’s most character-driven exhibition, as guests will follow the storylines of three main protagonists throughout the space.

In announcing the partnership, Meow Wolf and Titmouse released an image from an animated work directed by Luca Vitale. It features a key character having a moment with a hummingbird and it’s done in an elegant, slightly anime-influenced style. It’s an image full of movement, reflecting a character in transition with inviting pastels and bold dashes.

“I like that image because I think it captures some of the sense of wonder that we want people to feel,” Stephenson says. “The character is having an encounter with the elusive nature of creativity and reality in a way that makes them have a different perspective of what’s possible.”

Other contributing animation directors to Meow Wolf L.A. include Space Dawg, Felix Colgrave, Alexander Vanderplank and Phimémon Martin, and Jun Ioneda.

Titmouse’s partnership with Meow Wolf will extend beyond the L.A. exhibition. The two will be working on the development of Meow Wolf New York, which is slated to open some time after Los Angeles, and are collaborating on a planned animated series, which Prynoski is spearheading.

Meow Wolf exhibits are the result of sometimes hundreds of disparate artists coming together in a shared space. Distilling that into a signature, singular style for a series could be a challenge. Stephenson pinpoints some guiding principles.

“You really need to feel the hand of the artist,” he says. “You need to feel a DIY aesthetic. You need to feel the materiality. Those are very specific to what we are.”

On Wednesday, a federal appeals court denied President Trump’s request to stop the removal of his name from Washington, D.C.’s Kennedy Center. The signage on the building has been covered with tarp and scaffolding since June 13, but in a court filing last month, the center’s current executive director said that Trump’s name has been removed.

In their decision, three judges from the U.S. District Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit said that the president had failed to prove that the arts center would be “irreparably injured” without Trump’s name attached to it.

NPR requested comment from the Kennedy Center, but did not receive an immediate reply.

This latest round of court decisions is part of the ongoing litigation filed by Rep. Joyce Beatty, D-Ohio, against President Trump and the board of the Kennedy Center. In a statement emailed Wednesday to NPR, Beatty said: “Today’s ruling again affirms that this administration’s efforts to rename the Kennedy Center were unlawful. His name no longer desecrates this sacred memorial, which belongs to the American people. Now it is time for the Trump administration to accept this, comply with the law, and take the tarps down.”

In previous court filings, Trump’s legal team had asserted that removing the president’s name from the arts complex, both on the physical building and in its digital materials, would inflict irreparable harm in both time and money already spent. In the denial, the three judges — Patricia Millett, Robert Wilkins and Gregory Katsas — wrote that since Trump’s name has already been removed, “a stay would not avert those harms.”

Furthermore, Trump had claimed that without his name attached, future fundraising would be threatened “and [will] contribute to the financial decline of the Center.” In response, the appeals judges wrote: “Appellants, however, have failed to support this assertion with any specific facts or evidence. They offer only the conclusory assertions of the Kennedy Center’s Executive Director that were made in a factually unsupported declaration.” The center’s current executive director, Matt Floca, specializes in physical plant management.