Forty miles north of Flagstaff, Arizona just before entering the Diné nation and the Painted Desert sits a motel abandoned since 2005. The motel was built originally in the 1950s and as postcards from the 1980s advertised “…Our Gray Mountain motel is the Gateway to the Grand Canyon.”
Having fallen into a state of disrepair on a highway heavily used by motorists from the Navajo nation and around the world the Painted Desert Project invited Phoenix based artist Thomas “Breeze” Marcus to assemble a crew of artists to envision the space differently.
The crew included:
- Vyalone – Zuni, Raramuri, Chicano
- Breeze – Tohono O’odham / Adimel O’odham / Ponca / Otoe
- Douglas Miles – Apache
- Jerrel Singer – Diné
- LivA’ndrea Knoki – Diné
They assembled November 16 – 20, 2020 just before the temperature dropped and snow fell to paint socially distanced and masked for the Painted Desert Project.
