In celebration of grunt's 40th anniversary, we have commissioned designs from local artists, Cole Pauls and Marlene Yuen on 100% cotton black totes screenprinted in-house by Blim, a beloved print shop located in Vancouver's Chinatown. There is a large white graphic featuring Cole or Marlene's design on one side of the tote bag and a small grunt logo centered on the other side of the tote bag.

Measurement information:
Measurements are taken while the tote is laid flat and provided in the unit of inches.

19.5 wide by 14.5 high by 4.75 deep. 9.5 inches from the top of the bag to the top of the bag straps.

Questions? Please email [email protected] for information.

About the artists:

Cole Pauls is a Champagne and Aishihik Citizen and Tahltan comic artist, illustrator, and printmaker hailing from Haines Junction (Yukon Territory). He holds a BFA in Illustration from Emily Carr University. Residing in Vancouver, Pauls has created three graphic novels: Dakwäkãda Warriors (2019), Pizza Punks (2021) and Kwändür (2022). In 2017, Pauls won Broken Pencil Magazine’s Best Comic and Best Zine of the Year Award for Dakwäkãda Warriors II. In 2020, Dakwäkãda Warriors won Best Work in an Indigenous Language from the Indigenous Voices Awards and was nominated for the Doug Wright Award categories The Egghead & The Nipper. In 2022, Artspeak gallery, Vancouver, held the first solo exhibition of Pauls’ work, Dazhän Kwändür ch’e (This is a Story). In 2023, Kwändür won the Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize from the BC & Yukon Book Prize.

Marlene Yuen (she/her) is a multidisciplinary artist who lives and works on the unceded and ancestral home territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. Her current focus is on illustrations, comics, zines and handmade books. In 2021, her short-run book co-published by grunt gallery, Ho Sun Hing Printers, received an honourable mention from the City of Vancouver Book Awards program. It is about Canada’s first Chinese-English letterpress print shop. She has also created artworks about Vancouver’s historic Chinatown and Chinese Canadian workers for museums and galleries (including grunt!).

Image descriptions of the designs:

Image description of Cole Pauls’ design: A white screen-printed illustration on a black tote with bold line work and halftone shading throughout. At centre is a person standing in a kitchen. The person is wearing a hat with mesh at the sides, a long-sleeve sweater, pants, shoes, and is holding a bowl with one hand and a spoon with their other hand. They are eating while to the left is a stylized, form-line depiction of an animal, who is licking a spill on the floor. The kitchen features a stove with a towel hanging on the handle of the oven door, a pan on the stovetop, and a bottle lying on its side near the spill.

Image description of Marlene Yuen’s design: A white screen-printed illustration on a black tote depicting various condiment containers that are closed or in various states of being open. There is a bottle with a nozzle, a packet labeled “Sweet Sour,” a jar labeled “grunt Extract,” a squeeze bottle with a sunburst design and chicken pictured at centre, a packet with tomato images, a packet labeled “Plum Sauce”, a jar missing a lid has “XOXO” letters wrapping around its’ centre and the handle of a utensil sticks out of its’ opening, a small jar with a chili pepper icon, and a few other bottles and with different shapes and design features.