Roberto Benavidez’s bold, playful piñatas of fantastical creatures celebrate hybridity in nature—and in life.
For the past 15 years, Benavidez has been building elaborately decorated piñatas that riff on sexuality, race, Catholicism, nature, and beauty. Inspired by the hedonistic denizens of Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights and the fanciful creatures in the margins of medieval manuscripts, he transforms crepe paper into scales, feathers, and textures for his hollow papier-mâché creatures. Birds with half-missing beaks, rabbits with deer legs, armless frogs, and spiky-tailed squirrels are just a few of the oddities in his piñata menagerie. Benavidez, a Mexican American from South Texas who currently lives in Los Angeles, considers these “half-breeds” as central to his work: “I think of the hybrid creatures in this painting as a subtle reference to myself being mixed-race,” he says. His work has been widely collected and exhibited, and this June and July, he will show new abstract piñatas in a group exhibition called Passion for Paper at the Strohl Art Center in Chautauqua, New York. Paola Singer wrote about his fantastical visions in paper in “Raising the Piñata” in the Spring 2024 issue of American Craft.
After his Paper Bird and Birdr series—showing same-sex bird couplings—were featured in a wildlife magazine, Benavidez has been commissioned to make bird piñatas, such as Abstract No. 4, 2023, paper, paperboard, crepe paper, glue, wire, 13 x 12 x 7 in.
