Layers of Paper—and Meaning—in Roberto Benavidez’s Ivory-billed Woodpecker Piñata

Roberto Benavidez was always fascinated by the sculptural arts. One of his earliest memories growing up on a ranch in South Texas was of a cousin picking up a handful of clay from a pasture and shaping it into a little cowboy hat. “That just stuck with me,” Benavidez recalls. “I thought it was magic.”

Yet it took years for Benavidez to try sculpture himself, and even longer to settle on a meaningful medium. He studied acting in college but quit the business and took a corporate job shortly after moving to Los Angeles. In his free time, he started playing around with Sculpey, a kind of polymer clay that can be hardened in conventional ovens, and eventually enrolled in night classes to study art at a local community college. He liked metal casting, but found bronze was too expensive to work with outside the classroom.

Then one day he came across a photo of a piñata someone had made for their child’s birthday and was struck by its potential as a sculptural form. He liked that it was an accessible craft with a rich legacy in Mexican culture. “I got a lot of resistance to the piñata being a fine art form,” Benavidez says. “People were saying, ‘You should call it paper art so people understand it better.’” But comments like these rubbed him the wrong way: Benavidez, who is of Mexican and European descent, says he’s sensitive to people minimizing Mexican craft. It’s important to Benavidez to call his works piñatas even though—or rather, especially because—they are works of fine art.

Many of his earliest piñatas were of fantastical animals and birds inspired by the surreal and sinful painting “The Garden of Earthly Delights” by Hieronymus Bosch. “I kept it simple,” Benavidez says, thinking: “‘I’m just gonna make piñatas that I would want at my birthday party.’” But soon clients were clamoring for piñatas of real birds. He obliged—but continued to encode messages through subtle twists in his more lifelike renderings. “The more I learned about birds, the more I could see that I could start to say things with them,” he says.

For this project, Benavidez crafted a piñata of three Ivory-billed Woodpeckers—a charismatic species of Southeastern bottomland swamp forests whose possible extinction has spurred decades of debate. The artist took inspiration from one of John James Audubon’s famous watercolors, and set out to reimagine it in three dimensions.

Benavidez began by layering papier-mâché over balloons to create the underlying forms of the birds’ bodies. To craft the finer sculptural elements, he used paperboard for the wings and beaks, and wire for the legs and feet. He then added color and texture with different kinds of crepe paper, cut into a feathery fringe.

Benavidez included touches that offer additional layers of meaning, as he often does with his creations. The piece’s title, “Woodpecker Trinity,” serves as a covert reference to the Christian missionaries who used piñatas in their efforts to convert Indigenous communities, even designing the star piñata to represent the seven deadly sins.

Benavidez’s piñata also contains subtle references to queer sexuality. Unlike the original painting, all the birds in the “Woodpecker Trinity” are male, identifiable by their distinctive red crests. The birds focus their attention on a morsel of food, as they do in Audubon’s version, but Benavidez swapped out the 19^th century painter’s beetle for a snail. In Benavidez’s body of work, the mollusk symbolizes male genitalia—a reference to an erotically charged scene from the film “Spartacus.” “I grew up in the ’70s and ’80s and in the closet, so I’m kind of used to this coding,” he says.

Benavidez also modernized his interpretation by highlighting the tragic history of the Ivory-bill. Two of the three woodpeckers are covered in a layer of white crepe paper, muting the underlying colors, which the artist says could indicate that the birds have some kind of leucism—a condition that causes loss of pigmentation in animals. But the pallid plumage of the birds is also a reference to the species’ uncertain status and potential extinction.

Still, the piñata also hints that the Ivory-billed Woodpecker’s fate is not sealed. In 2023, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service decided against declaring the bird extinct, even as it noted that the last generally agreed upon sighting of the bird was in 1944. In Benavidez’s rendering, the third bird, presented in full color, pops against his ghostly brethren: a hopeful beacon of the possibility of life. “I also see this piece as a tribute to its existence,” the artist says.

This piece originally ran in the Summer 2025 issue. To receive our print magazine, become a member by making a donation today.