Route 66 Public Art Stops

RUN, Gallup

Two days before Robert Wilson learned the city of Gallup wanted him to create a sculpture on Route 66, the mixed-media artist was chasing a pair of jackrabbits along the trails of Albuquerque’s West Mesa. The connection clicked. The jackrabbit and the Mother Road share the same DNA: speed, desert crossings, and muscular bodies like the cars that once ruled Route 66. So he set out to combine them. Wilson cut a 1953 Chevrolet Bel Air down to its bones, then painstakingly reassembled the 1,280 pounds of vintage steel into RUN, a car-size jackrabbit at Babe Ruth Park, directly across from El Rancho Hotel. “The Bel Air’s curves were already animal,” says Wilson, who has hidden symbolism throughout the work. (Note: The left eye, crafted from the original speedometer, is set at 66 miles per hour.) “You always see something you didn’t see before.”

Pillars of Grants, Grants

When James Emory and his brother Blake received their first mural commission in 2024, Grants was struggling. Within eight months, the brothers painted the town—literally—with roughly 30 murals. In the process, a major shift began to take place. “Every mural became like a gathering,” Emory says. In nearby Milan, he gives a former gas station next to Blake’s Lotaburger the full treatment: a trompe l’oeil mural, making the garage look open again, with an eight-foot “muffler man” sculpture installed on the roof. “Murals give towns something everybody can share,” he says. At the Cibola County History Museum, in Grants, the brothers opted for something three-dimensional for Pillars of Grants, in which 8-foot-tall bronze-finish sculptures—an Acoma Pueblo member, a miner, and a Latino cowboy—stand tall in the front yard for Route 66’s centennial.

Beauty Behind the Wall, Gallup 

Gallup Cultural Center artist Brian Antonio (Laguna Pueblo) knows the Mother Road intimately. “It’s been a heartbeat through my reservation,” he says of the road he learned to drive on as a teenager. A fine-line artist, Antonio had never painted a mural before the city of Gallup and nonprofit gallupArts commissioned Beauty Behind the Wall, as one of five new murals added in 2025 for the anniversary. On the east side of the cultural center, the mural showcases a Laguna Pueblo–style sunface, its rays shifting from dark to light as pueblo buildings rise above thunderclouds. At the bottom, a mud-brick wall holds a quieter story from his childhood, when he scaled a wall to glimpse his first traditional dance. “That wall signifies the beauty behind the wall,” he says. “That’s where my mural is.”

El Viejo Camino/Old Road, Albuquerque

Where the old Route 66 meets the new on Fourth and Central, in Albuquerque, a flamenco dancer virtually performs in the only spot the Mother Road crosses itself, thanks to augmented reality (AR). Known in the flamenco world as La Chispa, dancer Carmen Montes trained in Spain under legendary flamenco families before building her life and art in Albuquerque as executive director of Casa Flamenca. Her likeness was captured with motion-tracking points of light mapped to her body, then brought to towering life by Santa Fe’s Refract Studio. “She’s like the size of Godzilla,” says Lauren Cason, co-founder of Refract Studio and co-creator of Route 66 Remixed, which features 16 new art installations—many of them AR based—on or near the Mother Road. 

Glowing Forward, Tucumcari

Before painting their Route 66 centennial mural, Tucumcari mother-daughter duo Franchesca Velasquez and Jazmine Jimenez did their homework. They interviewed locals, mostly elders, about what the town looked like in its heyday. “It’s about the neon, the motels, the travelers,” says Velasquez, “and the people who never left.” On the chamber of commerce’s back wall, the Glowing Forward mural showcases the town’s roadside motel and restaurant signs and a vintage red truck cruising through town toward the sunset. “We’re adding our own small chapter to a much bigger story,” explains Velasquez, who has painted 10 of the more than 100 murals in Tucumcari. “Murals give us a chance to shine a light and bring joy,” adds Jimenez.