In 1999 architect Thom Mayne and his office Morphosis commissioned Méndez to create a 25,000 square feet permanent art installation, a mural covering walls and ceilings, in the restaurant Tsunami in Las Vegas. Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum curator Ellen Lupton showcased the work in the first National Design Triennial in New York in 2000. In the catalogue 'Design Culture Now' she wrote: "Rebeca Méndez enables two-dimensional surfaces to harbor illusions of depth, endowing them with such physical qualities as translucency and tension. From the tidy rectangle of the page to the immersive scenario of an architectural interior, she transforms images from static, self-contained objects to open, flowing fields for visual experience." Méndez credits this collaboration with the moment she felt: "Ah, I'm a fine artist. This is what I want to do. That is really when I began working in parallel as both a designer and as an artist. Prior to that moment, I was very much a designer." Méndez collaborated again with Morphosis in 2004 to create two murals for the student recreation center at The University of Cincinnati, and this work was exhibited at the Centre George Pompidou in Paris, France, as part of a 2006 retrospective of the work of Thom Mayne and Morphosis. This project was the first design to ever receive a Platinum Award at Graphis Magazine. It also received an AIGA 365 Award of Excellence in 2007.