The 705 Erogenous Zone
Las Vegas, NV 2017 

2,000+ sqft mural (Video)

Dr. Laura Henkel, Sin City Gallery (curation)
Alison Chambers, The 705 (building)
"Downtown" Steve Franklin, The 705 (building)
Brian "Paco" Alvarez, Zappos (materials donation)


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, The 705 Erogenous 
Zone, the artist was worried about putting his suggest-
ive 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 liv-
ing in a small desert home in Joshua Tree where he says 
he lives in his “artist bubble.” Shook by the president-
ial 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.

And while the mural on 705  N. Las Vegas Blvd. wasn’t 
used as a soapbox, the imagery in this particular loca-
tion makes a statement on its own. His work often refer-
ences Franz von Bayros, the Austrian illustrator whose 
work depicts the white bourgeois class in decadent, 
sexual scenarios from a voyeuristic hetero male per-
spective. Read More, Aaron Sheppard