Join Sandra Trujillo for a video tour and reading of her recent title FUNERAL FOOD !

“FUNERAL FOOD presents stories about youth, familial connection to food, and creative and thrifty-minded individuals. The collection of stories is sketched from memory with an idea to reveal intimate connections between families and urban domestic experiences.

My goal for FUNERAL FOOD was to pay tribute to a diverse community of good cooks and speak about thrifty economies, material culture and foodways within California Chicano culture in the 1970s. FUNERAL FOOD is both simple to read and on first read funny. But the undercurrent of the book is about an economy and a family skating on the edge of poverty. The stories celebrate the cultural foods and people of my youth and illuminate overwhelming acts of generosity. I tried to create sensations about food and negotiate the uncanny circumstance for its abundance within the narrative and share the stories with others. FUNERAL FOOD has found homes in special collection libraries in California, Texas, and New York to support Chicano Studies and Foodways programs.

I’m a native of Vallejo, California, graduate of U.C. Berkeley with a B.A. in Religious Studies and graduate of CU Boulder in Art. I’m an artist and educator and live in Milledgeville, Georgia. I am also a Professor of Art at Georgia College and work within the realm of objects. Last year, I received a Georgia College grant to work alongside an artist and colleague, Valerie Aranda, to develop my stories into an artists’ book called FUNERAL FOOD. With the assistance of Clemente Orozco, Alexia Haltemann, and the amazing small team at Impronta Casa Editora in Guadalajara, Mexico we managed to work through format, effect, and object. Within each Impronta book, you see a labor of love, collaboration, and purpose. Impronta Casa Editora specializes in small artistic productions using rare vintage 19th century intertype and letterpress printing processes and the entire team is behind the scenes giving life to the work. The group represents true collaboration: cafecito fueling at Café Diamante, stocking and selecting books for la tienda, paper hauling, inter-typing, editing, inking, printing, sorting, binding to shipping you see the highest level of craft, care, and meaning.

The colophon is my favorite page of the project because it reminds me of all of the machinations that make a book come together. The human element is behind every mark. That’s why we love printed matter.

The book is limited to 100 printed portfolio editions with a cover aesthetic inspired by experiences and trends of printing in Mexico today and rare 19th century portfolios.”