Series to showcase Latino artist

By Robert Garcia

VCNC reporter

Ventura College will continue the Spring 2008 Arts & Lecture Series with a lecture and slideshow by muralist George Yepes on Thursday, April 17. The free event will take place at 7 p.m. in the second-floor reading room of the LRC. 

Yepes was born in Tijuana, Mexico; he moved to Los Angeles at the age of 4.  According to a VC media release, he left behind a troubled life on the street, graduated from CSULA with a degree in business administration and joined the Public Art Center. He became part of the Chicano Mural Movement of the 1970s.

Yepes has painted more than 800,000 square feet of social, historical and sacred images onto everything from churches, hospitals, freeway overpasses and the album cover of Los Lobos (originally entitled “La Pistola y El Corazon,” translating to “The Pistol & the Heart”), the media release states. His works also are on the 70-foot vaulted ceiling of the State Archives Museum in the state’s capitol in Sacramento and a 24-by-70-foot mural in Chicago.

Yepes shared his love of art by opening up the first free mural academy named the  “Academia De Arte Yepes.” He has taught more than 1,500 low-income students at the academy throughout the last decade. His students have painted 21 murals throughout Los Angeles as Yepes has completed 28 himself. 

His work has been collected by Sean Penn, Cheech Marin, Anthony Keidis, Robert Rodriguez and Madonna who purchased the original painting of the “La Pistola y el Corazon” in 1989.

For more information on the artist and a look at his work, visit www.georgeyepes.com.