You can see Ariana Enriquez’s artwork while driving down a street or riding along a bike path in several cities, including Chandler, Phoenix, Scottsdale, and Tempe, Arizona. That doesn’t mean galleries don’t carry her work; they do, but she’s made a name for herself as a muralist, creating most of her works on outside structures.

Enriquez completed her most recent project in March, when she painted four bike paths—each one 30-feet-by-five-feet—in Tempe. “They were next to an elementary school, and I painted them in two weeks while the students were on spring break,” she says. “Each path was inspired by one of the four classical elements: earth, air, fire, and water. For example, for earth I included rabbits, foxes, and cats, and for air I included birds of the Sonoran Desert.”

 

 

A few months before that, Enriquez painted murals on three large transformer boxes for Arizona Public Service in historic downtown Scottsdale near the Scottsdale Rodeo Museum/Noriega Livery Stable and the Cavalliere Blacksmith Shop, a third-generation shop that creates ornamental wrought-iron items. “My favorite focuses on the Parada Del Sol Rodeo and the events that take place there,” she says.

Enriquez, who lives in Mesa, Arizona, was born in El Paso, Texas, but grew up in Chandler. She earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree in painting and a Master’s Degree in art history from Arizona State University, then worked with museums for more than nine years as a registrar and helped organize their collections and exhibitions.

“I started painting murals on the weekends,” Enriquez says. “My first opportunity was creating murals for traffic cabinets in Chandler. Then, in 2020, during COVID, I applied for a call for art for a wall in downtown Chandler—a 225-foot-long wall along a canal walkway—and it added a vibrancy to the area. By 2022, my mural work had picked up enough that I felt it was time to jump ship.”

 

 

Her new ship had her painting fences in residential neighborhoods as well as in large, empty spaces in commercial areas. Botanical subjects often find their way into Enriquez’s murals, as do bluebirds and hummingbirds, which are common in Arizona. The Sonoran Desert is home to more than 2,000 species of plants and provides fodder for many of her murals, which include Barrel cactus, marigolds. She also paints King Protea, which is native to a region in South Africa and dates back about 300 million years.

“I love painting botanicals,” Enriquez says. “Some Sonoran plants are vibrant but overlooked because some of them are small. I love blowing them up on a wall or the side of a building.”