Dyana Hesson AAC January 2025
Arizona, with its extreme variations in elevation and climate, is home to almost 4,000 species of native plants, making it one of the most floristically rich regions in the United States. This abundance also makes it a perfect home for artist Dyana Hesson, whose focus is painting the state’s vast botanical biodiversity ahead of a sweeping showcase of her progress at Tucson’s Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum in the fall of 2025. Florals have been the subject of Hesson’s larger-than-life paintings for more than 30 years, but it was after her work was the subject of a large spread in Arizona Highways magazine in 2021 that she made a conscious decision to narrow her scope to the state’s wild botanicals, specifically.