Tucson native Cece Chavez graduated from the University of Arizona’s art school in December 2024. From an early age, Cece knew she needed art in her life, whether it was her full-time job or a side career. In art school, she fell in love with painting and printmaking, using her hands and more traditional studio practices rather than digital work. For the past two years, Cece has sold her art at the Made in Tucson Market (MinT), a lively community event traditionally held twice a year and organized in collaboration with the Historic Fourth Avenue Coalition. Significantly, it was through this coalition that the Beautify the Box project first took root, highlighting the instrumental role of local community organizations in launching public art initiatives.
Alongside her work at the Made in Tucson Market and volunteer roles with Bicycle Recycling and Education Center (BICAS) and the Community Gardens of Tucson, Cece looked for ways to put art directly into the neighborhood. “I wanted to create art directly for and in my community, my neighborhood, and surrounding neighborhoods.” When Beautify the Box launched five years ago, conceived by Johnny Carrillo and Judy Sensibar, she joined. Johnny Carrillo is a self-taught artist and former Marine Corps illustrator and combat artist who produced drawings live in the field and has exhibited at the National Marine Corps Museum; after 21 years of service, he retired in 2012 and opened a kitchen boutique with his partner, Nicole Carrillo, in Savannah, GA, and transitioned to surface design, illustration, and screen printing. In August 2016, he visited Tucson, fell in love with the city, and moved there three months later. He and his partner opened Rosie’s Barket in Oro Valley (formerly with a location on Historic Fourth Avenue). Johnny is currently the Art Chair for the Historic Fourth Avenue Coalition. Judy Sensibar, president of the 4th&4th Foundation board, is a longtime advocate for Fourth Avenue and nearby neighborhoods. She also teaches with the Pima County’s “Living River of Words: Youth Arts & Science” program, connecting local youth to the importance of water in the Sonoran Desert through art, science, and field experiences. Judy and Johnny met through the Historic Fourth Avenue Coalition and teamed up to lead Beautify the Box. Together, they guided three artists (including Cece Chavez), completed five utility-box artworks, and developed a replicable process to ease the technical and administrative burden on participating artists. As Johnny explains, “I wanted to create a process that could be replicated every single time. I did it with our team, and came up with basically a standard operating procedure.”
The first step is locating each utility box and taking meticulous measurements, one of the project’s biggest challenges because boxes rarely come in uniform shapes or sizes, and even a small error can spoil a wrap. Johnny’s background in product design and surface art made him the go-to person for this technical work: “I work in product design, so I’m constantly designing items and artwork for different surfaces, mostly textiles. Boxes are technically no different, just static. You have to have a lot of attention to detail.” Precision matters because the printer must account for every contour of the box. For this project, Johnny and Judy partnered with AZ Litho, which previously worked on Tucson’s “That’s a Wrap! Downtown’s Utility Box Art” project. Above all, their motivation was to beautify the neighborhood. After seeing similar programs around the country, they set out to transform “eyesores” into landmarks. As Johnny put it, “We are really into beautifying our surroundings as artists and as people. Leaning into neighborhood activism and what it really means. It’s taking objects and things that are sort of eyesores and repurposing them.”
Utility boxes are a common sight in every urban neighborhood. When asked what makes them eyesores, since they often blend into the environment, Johnny shared, “Growing up as a city kid, they become invisible. It’s like background noise. It starts to become kind of a blight, mechanically and physically, when they start to break down, like some of our boxes. When boxes get graffiti on or are plastered with flyers after years, they no longer remain invisible, and you start to ask, ‘Who’s taking care of these things?’ So the hope is, as Judy and I initially discussed, that you see something uplifting and start to care more about your environment. When you see a beautiful artwork, you don’t want to flyer it. You start to look at your environment more positively. So, it’s like a pebble in a pond making ripples of positive action.”
Funding for the project came from two sources: the Historic Fourth Avenue Coalition (which includes the Made in Tucson Market) and the West University Neighborhood Association. Beautify the Box was also made possible by the Arts Foundation’s Donations process. The Donation process is a community-driven effort reviewed by the Public Art and Community Design Committee at a public meeting, where the proposal is put to a vote. Multiple stakeholders participate as the proposal moves through the review process. To learn more about this process, please refer to the guidelines here.
Reflecting on the process, Cece observed, “I think it’s important to emphasize that even as a community project, it was surprisingly difficult to get the city to comply to serve our community with public art.” Judy shared, “You have to be really clued into your neighborhood resources,” noting that having contacts in departments like Transportation and Mobility is essential to getting a project like Beautify the Box approved. She was generous in offering pro-tips on how their team brought the project to life.
When Cece joined Beautify the Box, she had never completed public artwork on such a scale. She was grateful for Johnny and Judy’s support and encouragement throughout the process. Of the five utility boxes in the project, Cece chose the most uniquely shaped and challenging one to measure in her neighborhood. “I live in a historic house. And I just love odd shapes and little emblems. There are so many details that I can just lean into. So I don’t care if this box is weird, old, and unused. I have to figure out a way to do it.” While Johnny measured the other participating artists’ boxes, Cece, with the help of her partner, Harrison Cable, meticulously measured her own utility box and truly took ownership of the project. She then created a series of four large paintings on watercolor paper, drawing inspiration from the volcanic rock foundations found in homes near West University. “I found myself independently studying the architecture in my neighborhood while going on walks. I’ve been living in the West University neighborhood for four years now, and I still find new details and charm everywhere I look.” Cece wanted to recreate the look and feel of the apartments in front of the utility box, seeking an aged stucco effect reminiscent of sun-bleached Tucson homes, each with its own personality.
Each artist involved in the Beautify the Box project brought their own creative vision to the utility boxes, transforming them into neighborhood landmarks. Johnny and Judy reflected on the project’s purpose and potential: “We thought about Beautify the Box pretty hard, especially how we can make this sustainable in the future. We are thinking of this project as a small pebble rolling down a big hill, and we want it to catch momentum and give everyone the opportunity to do it.”
Judy added, “There are so many boxes to be covered, but the Department of Transportation and Mobility (DTW) could only manage to approve five boxes in our neighborhood. Many of the boxes are owned by TEP. I hope they step up and cooperate with Beautify the Box (BTB) in the future.” Johnny hopes their model inspires more artists, especially emerging artists, like Cece, to get involved in public art: “Once you go through the process and you figure out, you know, technically how to do it and administratively how to do it. Come on, let’s go! Let’s cover the whole town!”
Artist: Johnny Carrillo
Title: Patterns in the Storm
Location: SE corner, 4th Ave and University Blvd, corner of Trinity Presbyterian Church
Johnny, a HUGE fan of Time Market and Trinity Presbyterian Church, was especially excited to work on a box near the church, an important community hub that offers many services, such as a food pantry. Drawing inspiration from his connection to these spaces, Johnny designed a piece he described as “full of life and lines and flowing.” After a color study, he chose a blue palette to evoke an “ever-flowing and replenishing storm.” He adds, “It’s about abundance. It’s not chaotic. There’s a pattern in the storm. It’s rejuvenating, a never-ending cycle of moisture. Like a figure eight, the way it loops around itself.”
Artist: Gabe Sensibar
Title: Marshall Gulch Fairy Wall
Location: 5th east of 4th Ave (north of Brooklyn Pizza parking lot)
One installation outside Brooklyn Pizza on Fourth Avenue features a blended photographic series of a rock wall on Mount Lemmon. The nature images provide a cool respite from Fourth Avenue’s dense urban streetscape. That particular box had been in disrepair and was missing a metal door; the West University Neighborhood Association arranged for a welder from Sparks and Arcs to fix it. Gabe’s photographs, including a shot of the Marshall Gulch “fairy wall” on Mount Lemmon, fit the restored box perfectly and highlight the city’s diversity and its hidden natural environments. As Judy notes, “When you think of the Sonoran Desert, you don’t normally think of this lush, rainforesty area.”
Artist: Johnny Carrillo
Title: Flight Bloom Coil
Location: NW corner, 6th Ave and University Blvd
Johnny’s artwork, titled Flight Bloom Coil, features abstracted desert forms. Johnny explains, “Everything is in motion… an action, which is like that particular corner to me on Fourth Avenue. I love that area so much—it’s kind of the main hub and artery. I wanted something full of activity and life, something bold. It was all designed so that if you were at a light and you closed your eyes, the residual image would stay with you long after you were gone.” Judy specifically wanted Johnny to design these two boxes because they “bookend” either end of 4th Ave, one at the top of University Blvd. and the other at Sixth Street.
Johnny’s designs are rooted in his sketchbook illustrations: “This was a series I did about two summers ago. One morning, I sat down for several hours and created drawings in black ink. All these desert sketches from this session have made an appearance in the work I am doing now in one way or another.”
Artist: Lex Gjurasic
Title: Radical Happiness
Location: NW corner of 6th Ave and 6th St (in front of Chez Peachy)
Johnny shares, “Lex is a fantastic painter. They create large, colorful floral arrangements. Really creative work. What you see on the box is actually a composite of at least five of Lex’s paintings, scanned in high resolution and seamlessly combined. The result is stunning every time I see it. It embodies radical happiness.”
Artist: Cece Chavez
Title: Your House
Location: SE corner, 6th Ave and University Blvd
Every finished utility box features a plaque on top displaying the title of the artwork and the artist’s name, giving each piece a sense of identity and recognition within the neighborhood.
To other artists interested in Beautify the Box and public art projects, Cece offers this advice: “Talk to people and see what’s happening around you. I finally decided to attend my West University Neighborhood Association meeting a few months ago, and it helped me connect with a few more people. That experience really expanded what I could do and learn, and gave me a better sense of what’s actually happening in the neighborhood. There are a lot of folks who aren’t in my age range either, so it’s important to get involved—literally just walk around and see what’s going on. Think about how you can add to your environment and your community, depending on what inspires you and what you notice around you. Maybe that doesn’t work for every neighborhood, but here in Tucson, I feel like people can come together to do different art projects and little community-boosting things that build better, more vibrant environments.”
Photo credit: Julius Schlosburg
