Trinidad Escobar was born in July 1986 in Bataan, Philippines. She can be contacted directly by e-mail at escobarcomics@gmail.com or on her website! I think that Trinidad’s website has been put together by her agent, Alex Slater from Trident Media Group.
Trinidad is an artist who creates art in many forms: she does poetry, painting, comics, and books. Overall, it seems that she defines herself as a storyteller from her personal website. She has done a lot of her work in Oakland and San Francisco, at all the places that she’s gone to present her work and attend the different events. She has done talks, exhibitions, zine fests, art festivals, and other events.
Looking into Trinidad’s website she’s done so much amazing work! She does a lot of work based on her culture/background, queerness, love, and childhood, and a lot of images have meaning to them: for example, she illustrates animals in her poems, which have a deeper meaning. She has a comic, Silently Gathering Force, about being strong and protecting her brother, and she uses a wave as a metaphor for any challenge that comes towards her or tries to hurt her little brother.
In some work she does poems in the form of a collage. She uses a black-and-white theme for some illustrations, sketches, and other forms. There are many emotions in each work. Themes include history, feelings, funny times, and memories. Her work is found on her website www.trinidadescobar.com and also on her Instagram, @escobarcomics. It seems that she updates her Instagram with mini comics. People seem really to love it, and her stories resonate.
Screenshot that I took of Trinidad’s 2016 poem uploaded to her website. I took a screenshot of part of her work because it’s very long!
Illustration made by Trinidad (2019) uploaded on her website
Artist: Trinidad Escobar
Author: Malaka Gharib
3rd Page
Comic: The Colonial Roots of Pimiento Cheese
*Her comic was posted fully on The Nib website*
I couldn’t find when she came to Oakland. It is stated on People Pill’s website that she was adopted into a Filipino-American family in San Jose. She has worked in Oakland, and it looks like she is all over the Internet for the mural that she worked on at the Oakland Peace Center with 3 Realms Collective, which she is part of. It seems like she lived in Oakland from her work and her Instagram, but I have no idea for how long she did. There’s not much information about when she arrived in Oakland and when she came to the States.
Artwork by 3 Realms Collective (includes Trinidad)
Photo from Wikipedia
Mural at the Oakland Peace Center
On this website called People Pill it says that she went to SF State to study creative writing. She continued to study creative writing as a graduate student at Naropa University and then went to the California College of the Arts to do an MFA in Comics. A lot of her college and post-college education has to do with art and writing! As mentioned before, she’s done so much work and presented all over the Bay Area, and she has traveled to other states and has even gone to other countries!
In an interview with TAYO Literary Magazine she was asked to talk a bit more about herself, and she said that she’s been an artist since she was a young one. She said in the interview that she was around 4 when she started doing portraits!!! That’s amazing, at that age I was a preschooler. I don’t know if that’s when she got started as an artist, but it might be because she was so young at that age! On Trinidad’s website it says that she was part of poetry programs during her college and graduate years. Her launch in poetry was called Loved Letters. She presented work of hers at the San Jose Museum of Art in 2009 for an event.
This screenshot is the earliest that I could find of her work, a screenshot that I took from Trinidad’s Instagram of a post where she included info in the caption about an event that she was going to attend at Blackball Universe. This post was in January of 2013.
This picture is another screenshot that I took from her Instagram of her at an expo called Komiks Expo. It is from June 2013. However, she’s attended earlier events to show her artwork: for example, as mentioned previously, in 2009.
Haunts:
- One of the places in Oakland where she has done artwork is at the Oakland Peace Center (111 Fairmount Avenue, Oakland, CA 94611), where the organization that she is part of, 3 Realms Collective, created a mural. It’s called the Sweet Medicine Mural, and it was created in 2016, unveiled specifically on October 30! It seems that the Sweet Medicine Mural Project is the name for the bigger project.
I did find on her Instagram that she feels at home with these two artists. There’s not much info from the post, but I think that this place that she posted a picture of is very important to her.
Here’s a close-up screenshot that I took of Trinidad’s Instagram post, so this picture must have been posted on the 17th of December of last year. It seems like she either goes here or lives here with two other artists from the Bay Area from what I saw on her Instagram and website and because they came into our class.
Trinidad’s website says that she spends time at the beach, and I did see her Instagram posts about going to the beach with her son and her partner, so she does love the beach a lot. It shows that the beach is an important place for her and her family, and she did make a drawing about a moment that she had with her son at the beach.
A screenshot that I took
Here’s the post that I was talking about previously, and Trinidad posted this drawing on October 11 last year on her Instagram.
~ by Maya Martin Jimenez ~
External Links:
A) Trinidad’s Instagram:
1) https://www.instagram.com/escobarcomics/?hl=en
2) https://www.instagram.com/p/aG1WvYS3oY/
3) https://www.instagram.com/p/B6Ri9SphvfG/
B) Trinidad’s website:
1) http://www.trinidadescobar.com/
2) http://www.trinidadescobar.com/contact-1
3) http://www.trinidadescobar.com/silently-gathering-force
4) http://www.trinidadescobar.com/portraiture/yq5gpcse000rf0eteg4ioi0qb02s5y
5) http://www.trinidadescobar.com/portraiture
C) Trinidad on other websites:
1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinidad_Escobar
2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinidad_Escobar#/media/File:Oakland_Peace_Center_Mural_1.png
3) https://peoplepill.com/people/trinidad-escobar/
4) https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2019/05/19/724322542/the-colonial-roots-of-pimiento-cheese
5) http://www.tayoliterarymag.com/blog-2/2016/6/22/guest-interview-crushed-by-trinidad-escobar
6) https://thenib.com/the-colonial-roots-of-cheese-pimiento
D) YouTube videos of Trinidad Escobar:
1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEoj00aEmN4
2) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jC0R1qb1-qk
3) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpNf_W1-3UQ
4) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhqWklj2mH8
5) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qa_2u6MRPsQ
6) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1LbBB5ZqH4
7) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ibjerxysws
