Sept. 22–Roland Sabates could not have picked a better location to open a small hotel with art as its primary draw.

Now taking reservations, the renovated Oak Street Mansion, at 4333 Oak St., is within walking distance of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art and the Kansas City Art Institute.

But guests can also have an art experience inside the hotel, where every room, from the foyer to the guest suites, is decorated with works from Sabates’ collection.

Sabates began his journey in art by collecting African pieces. In the late 1970s, he and his wife, Marcia, went to Nigeria, where he did eye surgery, and she worked in the clinic. A selection of their African acquisitions is now on view in a gallery at the back of the main hotel and in spots throughout the house.

A pride of the collection is a beaded Bamileke throne with two figures from Cameroon. Sabates says most of the African works he bought date from the early to mid-20th century.

Sabates, who was born in Cuba and still has family there, has also collected contemporary Cuban art, which represents the edgiest works in his collection.

But from a local standpoint, most fascinating are his broad holdings of regional art. Encompassing landscapes, figuration, surrealism and an abstraction or two, most of it is not particularly innovative or chance-taking, but it’s not your typical “hotel art,” either.

Taken together, the works offer a Kansas City art history populated by many artists who have been forgotten or overlooked. Nevertheless, many of them exerted considerable influence in their day as teachers at the Art Institute, the University of Missouri-Kansas City and the University of Kansas.

Thomas Hart Benton, who is represented by several lithographs, forms the fulcrum of the collection, which features works by his Art Institute predecessors, including John Douglas Patrick, George Van Millett, James L. Fitzgibbon and Ross Braught, and paintings by several of Benton’s students.

Several artists in the collection, notably Arthur Kraft, whose surreal “Stained Glass Madonna” hangs in the staircase, enrolled after Benton’s departure.

An accompanying catalog, with entries on the individual artists written by Sabates, features a foreword by Burton L. Dunbar, professor of art history at UMKC, who lays out the chronology of artists and their institutional affiliations.

Sabates’ involvement with regional art began when he went to an auction that included works by Millett (1864-1953).

“I read about him and learned he was once regarded as the dean of Kansas City art,” Sabates said, but after his death, his reputation “disappeared.” Sabates bought multiple works by Millett, whose passion, as noted in the catalog, “was plein air painting of the Missouri landscape.”

In 2011, the Albrecht-Kemper Museum of Art in St. Joseph mounted a big retrospective of Millett’s work, curated by art historian and writer Lynn Mackle.

Once he got started, “I started finding other artists who were semi-forgotten,” Sabates said. One of his favorites is Richard Dean Turner (1935-2012), who studied at the Art Institute but was better known as the owner of Full House Antiques in Green Ridge, Mo., than for his paintings.

Sabates bought multiple paintings by Turner, including “Summer Storm” (2004) and “Redbuds” (2003). At an auction of Turner’s estate in 2012, Sabates said, “I even bought his palette.”

It’s on display at the hotel.

Sabates hunted for art at galleries and auctions on the Internet, and in some cases he contacted artists’ relatives and previous owners of their works. His regional collection includes pieces by Birger Sandzen, Robert Sudlow, Frederic James, Jim Hamil and Robert Berkeley Green.

He takes the collection up to the present with sculptures by Art Institute students and alums, including Jim LeGrande, who carved an outdoor figurative piece titled “Pygmalion” from granite left over from the construction of the original Nelson.

Each of the guest rooms in the hotel has a different theme. One features lithographs; another is devoted to abstraction.

When Sabates spotted an artist painting a mural on a building in the Crossroads Arts District, he asked him if he would be interested in doing one in a hotel. He commissioned self-taught Jesse Hernandez to paint the history of Kansas City, with trains, trucks and the skyline, on one of the guest room walls. The room is called the “Street Art Suite.”

Sabates estimates Oak Street Mansion has more than 100 artworks on display. “I thought people might find them interesting,” he said. But those 100-plus artworks represent only 40 percent of his holdings, leaving plenty of art for the couple to enjoy in their home on the top floor of the Ponce De Leon, a residential building he previously restored at 46th and Main streets.

And the collection continues to grow.

“I still keep collecting,” he said. “Every two to three weeks, I buy a new piece. I just bought a Charles Wilimovsky, who was a professor at the Art Institute in 1920. He wasn’t there long, but he influenced John Steuart Curry.”

Sabates credits his family with bringing the Oak Mansion project to fruition, but the illustrated book “The Oak Street Mansion: The History, Art and Sculpture of Kansas City’s Small Art Hotel” is his personal labor of love.

“Every room will have a book,” he said.

In addition to a catalog of the artworks, a “Neighborhood” section at the back features a map and descriptions of the city’s cultural amenities, from the Nelson to the Crossroads Art District.

More information

“The Oak Street Mansion: The History, Art and Sculpture of Kansas City’s Small Art Hotel,” by Roland Sabates (softcover, $24.95) is available at The Kansas City Store.

To reach Alice Thorson, call 816-234-4783 or send email to athorson@kcstar.com.