Habitually armed with colored pencils and crayons as a kid, Helen Yanez rarely went a day without opening a coloring book during her childhood.
The Santa Maria resident described her attachment to the activity as analogous to the relationship between kids and their iPads nowadays.
“I think pastels are like the adult, grown version of a crayon,” said Yanez, who gradually graduated from coloring book fare to pastels and watercolors as she grew older.
Today she uses both to create art for herself and others by commission, through her job as a freelance illustrator. Between that and her role as art program manager at Corazón del Pueblo in Santa Maria, Yanez’s life is wall-to-wall art, so to speak.
As for literal wall space, the interior of Corazón Café in downtown San Luis Obispo is lined with colorful creations by Yanez and other artists featured in the restaurant’s second annual Chingonas show, on display through the end of April.
Participants of the exhibit, which debuted in early March, were asked to submit artworks depicting women, in celebration of Women’s History Month. With this theme in mind, Yanez decided to paint a portrait of her grandmother. As a reference photo, Yanez chose a snapshot taken when her grandmother, seen dressed in traditional Zapatista attire, was 19.
“She was not a Zapatista, but dressed that way for an event,” said Yanez, whose works often explore and celebrate aspects of her heritage.
Originally from Michoacán, Mexico, Yanez was 12 when her family relocated to the Central Coast. She then attended Tommie Kunst Junior High School and Pioneer Valley High School, two of the seven schools in the Santa Maria Valley where student walkouts commenced on Feb. 18 to protest immigration enforcement tactics.
Yanez was among the adult volunteers who helped chaperone the students who marched 5 miles from Righetti High School in Orcutt to Santa Maria City Hall that day, to call for city officials to designate a 2-mile radius of protection between residents and ICE officers at schools, churches, parks, and hospitals.
Prior to volunteering, Yanez originally got involved with the rally after organizer Cesar Vasquez reached out to her over Instagram to ask if he could use one of her artworks in a flyer to promote the protest.
“It was lovely to not only be part of it through my art but be there myself,” Yanez said.
Through her job at Corazón del Pueblo, Yanez recently helped coordinate Nuestra Lotería, a multi-week joint project between students at Righetti High School and Santa Maria High School. Young participants were asked to pick “a topic regarding any social issue,” Yanez said, write a report on said topic, and then visualize it through a Loteria card-style artwork.
She said almost half of the students who participated chose to focus their projects on topics related to immigration enforcement and ICE protocols.
“You’re visually educating the Santa Maria community on what you think should be fixed, what you think we should talk about more,” Yanez said about the prompt students were given ahead of the assignment.
Alongside collaborations with local schools, Corazón del Pueblo—also referred to as the Cultural and Creative Arts Center of the Santa Maria Valley—periodically facilitates free art classes and demos for kids and teens at various venues in town. One of Yanez’s favorite aspects of these events is how surprisingly invested some participants’ parents become.
During a clay crafting program at Santa Maria Bici Centro in December, for example, Yanez said the event “ended up being a workshop for the parents.”
“The kids were, at the end, just eating pizza and playing outside, and the parents were full-on doing the craft themselves,” Yanez recalled. “We’d hear, ‘Oh this is so relaxing, I haven’t done this in years.’ … Some of them from Oaxaca, Mexico, grew up doing pottery [and said], ‘Oh I haven’t done this since I was a teenager.’”
Arts Editor Caleb Wiseblood wrote the first draft of this article with a crayon. Send comments to cwiseblood@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Mar 27 – Apr 6, 2025.
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