Aaron Sheppard has a complex. Well, a few of them. But on this warm and breezy mid-May day, while he is in the beginning stages of his latest mural, “705 Erogenous Zone,” the artist was worried about putting his suggestive work on three very public walls in a low-income, Latino and black community in the Cultural Corridor. “Sometimes I feel like I don’t have the authority to place this imagery in public,” he says. “Fuck, here comes another white boy coming to change what little we got left.”
Sheppard, a painter, sculptor and performer originally from Nebraska who received his MFA at UNLV, is now living in a small desert home in Joshua Tree where he says he lives in his “artist bubble.” Shook by the presidential election, Sheppard began to question the validity of his political and social opinions as a white male. He says people regularly comment on his height, or assume he’s in a band, a presumption that pales in comparison to being judged by race. “I don’t feel so secure in my place to address such things. And that’s something that I have to figure out,” he says. > Read More
Photo of Aaron Sheppard by Krystal Ramirez | Photos of The 705 Erogenous Zone by Laura Henkel
