Ariana Enriquez has come a long way from the eighth grade, when she used to trade her in-class doodles for snacks.
The graduate painting student, who will receive her MFA in May of 2021, was selected as an ASU-LACMA fellow, and she works in the registrar’s office at the ASU Art Museum, where she has been able to handle work by the two artists on whom she is writing her thesis: Margarita Cabrera and Ana Teresa Fernandez.
“Seeing it, touching it, hands on, was the first thing that got me into their work,” Enriquez said. “Both are creating work about and on the border, looking into women’s invisible domestic labor and analyzing contemporary migrant life. As an artist myself, I identify with them as Mexican American artists, and I really am drawn to the resiliency that they’re highlighting.”
Enriquez says she started taking art seriously in high school. She credits her uncle with taking her to art museums in L.A when she visited him there, and she praises the “really wonderful art teachers who were passionate and inspiring” at Chandler High School.
Now, right down the street from Chandler High, Enriquez has left an enduring mark: her first mural, titled “Hum of the Desert.”
Enriquez admires murals and muralists for the “beauty and individuality” they contribute to the community, and says that she had always wanted to try creating a mural herself, having never worked on such a large project.
