ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. -- Dade Lahar stepped into the hotel room with splashes of electric blue and tepees outlined in neon green before scanning a mural that offered a contemporary take on American Indian reservation life.
"Whoa," the 9-year-old said while donning a pair of 3-D glasses to see how the room's painted geometric designs and abstract landscapes could seemingly fill the space around him. "This is the absolute, most coolest room in the whole wide world."
It's also part of an ongoing project at Nativo Lodge, a boutique hotel in New Mexico's largest city, to transform guest rooms into spaces that owners say can be considered art pieces unto themselves.
The concept of commissioning artists to convert guest rooms into contemporary, large-scale installation works has taken hold at a handful of hotels. For New Mexico, where art connoisseurs and collectors may be more likely to hit places like Taos and Santa Fe, the rooms at Nativo Lodge have created a new art stop along Interstate 25 amid a string of mostly chain hotels and businesses.
"We don't put any restrictions on the artists," said Maresa Thompson, the hotel's marketing director. "We say, 'What do you want to bring?' And their vision changes as they stay here and create their rooms."
She started recruiting emerging artists to paint rooms at the hotel several years ago, with the idea of making contemporary American Indian art more accessible to the public outside of a gallery or museum setting, and at an inexpensive property, she said. Rooms cost about $80 per night.
Guests who want to stay in an artist room can call in and request the room of their choice after viewing options online.
So far, 12 New Mexico artists have transformed rooms at Nativo Lodge with large-scale paintings and murals. Scenes convey Southwestern landscapes, figures from tribal stories and other American Indian imagery, ranging from spiritual to abstract.
Randy Barton, who started out as a street artist, painted a room with an abstract study on the 50 arrowheads of the Navajo Nation flag. From one end of the wall to the other, where the room's television stands, Barton painted lines shooting in nearly every direction to create asymmetrical geometric shapes in hues of beige, orange and brown.
"The room is called 'All Direction Protection,'" Barton said. "I made all the arrowheads just kind of shoot out everywhere and that's how I made this design here."
Estella Loretto, a sculptor and painter from Jemez Pueblo, said she wanted to create a room that reflected on the sun and the "gift of a new day." Behind the room's queen-size bed, a turquoise sun rises against a yellow backdrop in one of several murals in the room.
Ishkoten Dougi, a Navajo and Apache artist who says he is intent on presenting American Indian imagery in a different light, has painted a room with the mural he titled Art Reservation. Instead of queen-size beds, the hotel placed a pair of miniature toy tepees in the middle with twin, kid-size mattresses inside.
Info: nativolodge.com
Travel on 06/26/2016