Excluding categories in wp_get_recent_posts

Hello,
I was trying to add a category that I’m using for the event calendar plugin, only it has you add in the events as a post. Which is fine, but I’m using wp_get_recent_posts so that I can get the five most recent posts for that part of the site. I was trying to find how to exclude this events category from that query because I don’t want those to show up there. Would I have to use a different built-in function or is it possible to just put in another parameter like &cat=-cat_number?

Thanks in advance!