CONTEMPORARY ART
ARTISTS WHO REGULARLY WORK WITH PIÑATAS
Based in Baltimore, she is interested in the connections between aesthetic inclinations within economic and cultural status. Through an abstract and materialistic visual vocabulary, she questions the optics of classist structures, while seducing with a maximalist aesthetic. Highly saturated colours and a rich variety of textures create an initial attraction, while at the same time challenging assumptions of 'good' taste. Made from cut paper, ribbons, sequins, found objects, you name it, these sculptures are full of texture, colour and movement. Reminding us of May trees, flower necklaces and exploded piñatas, they are contemporary interpretations of ancient traditions.
Julie Ho and Nicholas Andersen, a duo of talented New Yorkers, work with piñatas and other shiny objects - garlands, fringe, banners, pennants and flowers - using everyday materials to achieve creative and truly spectacular party decorations. His work has been seen from catwalks to concert stages, working for countless institutions such as The New York Times, PS1 / MOMA, American Ballet Theatre, brands such as Mercedes Benz, J Crew, Opening Ceremony, Bergdorf Goodman and artists such as Beyoncé. With special attention to geometric shapes, you can see the imprint of Julie's Taiwanese Chinese and Nicholas' Hawaiian origins in each of their works. Since 2008 they have been making all their work by hand. They met through a shared experience in the arts and a mutual interest in piñatas.
Diana Benavídez is a binational artist from the San Diego (US)/ Tijuana (Mexico) border region. Her work focuses on extending the presence of an ephemeral object: the piñata. Diana works with the piñata to magnify taboo subjects surrounding the female body, to reflect upon growing up in a Catholic household, and to tell stories about the Mexican/American militarized border. Despite being an object traditionally designed for celebration, she works the skin and form of the piñata to invoke feelings of disconformity and anguish. Complicating the emotional role of a piñata causes the audience to question its purpose as an object to be destroyed.
The body of his work focuses on engaging the Latinx community with contemporary art through public and guerrilla installations. Through the use of text and the characteristics of the piñata, he is able to comfortably engage underserved audiences and provoke debate, self-reflection and an examination of one's circumstances. Spanglish idioms, which often fail in English translation, are incorporated into the work. The subtext lost through translation becomes a broader metaphor for society's misunderstanding of cultures considered foreign. The text is specifically selected in an effort to reach an audience not normally catered to or comfortable with art. He considers his artwork as a social practice that seeks inclusion through the placement of art and language.
Several years ago he thought it would be cool to find a little piñata to hang from the rear view mirror of his car. He looked in several places and couldn't find anything, so he made one himself. After some trial and error, he finally created his little piñatas! Tissue paper, glue, thick paper, string, ribbon and a bit of creativity, that's all he needed to get the job done. Each little piñata is no bigger than the size of her palm, about 4 inches tall and wide. All handmade in Fresno, CA.
Isaias D. Rodriguez is a freelance multimedia artist and producer. Originally from Boyle Heights, CA, he moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1996, where he explored video production and multimedia art. He currently lives in Fresno, CA.
Jefferson Quintana
Born in Venezuela, living in Miami, he is a graphic designer, children's illustrator and piñata maker. Currently, together with his husband, Leonardo van Schermbeek, he captains The Piñata Factory.
Piñatas have always been a source of fascination in his life since he was a child, being the preferred medium for his formal and visual experimentation as an artist. His work reveals his unique perspective as a designer of piñata forms. For Jefferson, a piñata is much more than a candy recipient. It is a creative, textured, three-dimensional medium - a sculpture, in other words, a handmade object to be preserved and cherished.
As a multidisciplinary artist, he likes to express his identity by exploring notions of authenticity and place using familiar materials to make large-scale installations, sculptures and paintings. His interest in art history, Latinx culture, community, celebration, home, and his obsession with pop culture inform my practice with the intention of dismantling institutional hierarchies, making my work accessible and fun. As a queer person of colour in the United States, he believes that expressing joy, occupying space, and simply existing is a political act.
Based in Las Vegas, Nevada, and known for large-scale installations and sculptures that manifest his interactions with American pop culture and the Latinx experience, Justin Favela has exhibited his work both internationally and in the United States. His installations have been commissioned by museums such as the Denver Art Museum in Colorado and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas.
Mañana republic is the work of four hands, two by Kat and two by Derek from their home studio in Phoenix, Arizona, USA.
Each piñata is handmade, some from paper, some from clay, some from palm trees, coffee filters and the like.
They are often inspired by traditional forms of Mexican culture such as burritos or the figure of the wrestler as well as the use of earthy colours. Somewhere between here and there and now and then // but a bit beyond the sign and the fence and the horses and the sunset.
Behind Más que Piñatas is María Camba, in other words...myself ;)
Making piñatas has allowed me to channel part of my interests into a single object; models, coloured paper, geometrical forms from nature, folklore, ephemeral installations . . . . All that and much more goes into them, but for me, the most important thing is that they are artefacts capable of generating joy around them and that gives them the category of almost magical. When I made the first one, I thought the process was great, although the best part came when I broke it and saw the faces of the kids... and the grown-ups! At that moment I felt I wanted to make many more and provoke that smile in other people :))))
With special interest in their ritualistic power and their fun way of creating community, I try to rescue the symbolic value they had in the past. I usually make giant piñatas that are destroyed in community events and used in public spaces.
A Colombian, the son of teachers, he was punished at school, which was to be the trigger for much of his work. After several failures to enter the National University, he is introduced, thanks to Icetex, in the University of Bogotá Jorge Tadeo Lozano where he studied his undergraduate degree with middle-class joy and small belligerent virtues. Before graduating, he worked in different cafés, parallel to his activities as a magician's assistant, waiter, barman and guide of the collections of the Banco de la República. Since 2000 he has been exhibiting regularly, first with his partner Camilo Turbay, with the TODOPIPAS collective. At the same time he exhibits individually in the country and abroad. His projects focus on problems of education, local warfare and the occasional out-of-his-mind remark. At the moment he is more dedicated to cooking, pineapple decoration and the odd very sensitive idea.
Roberto Benavidez is a figurative sculptor from South Texas, now based in Los Angeles, specializing in the piñata form. Benavidez plays with underlying themes of race, sexuality, ephemerality, beauty and sin, layered with his identity as a mixed-race queer artist, with a focus on impeccable craftsmanship. Benavidez’s sculptures have been featured in national, international and on-line publications, including Artsy, Atlas Obscura, hifructose.com, Hyperallergic, Politiken, and This Is Colossal.
His most notable series, Piñatas of Earthly Delights, is based on the fanciful creatures that roam Hieronymus Bosch’s, The Garden of Earthly Delights, and was exhibited at the AD&A Museum on the campus of UC Santa Barbara. He has exhibited his work in numerous group and solo shows, including at Riverside Art Museum, Mesa Contemporary Art Museum and Palo Alto Art Center, to name a few.
Writer, educator and artist based in Los Angeles. She works with piñatas from her PiñataLab, a site dedicated to her work with piñatas as vectors of transition and clarity through destruction. His works have been made and destroyed at The Hammer Museum, REDCAT, Machine Project, Human Resources LA, Pomona College and Riverside Art Museum, all in the US, to name a few.
He recently published a monographic photography book on Robert Cumming and, since 2014, has taught history of photography at Chaffey College. His artistic writings can be found in Aperture , The PhotoBook Review, Photo-Eye Blog, ArtSlant, Hyperallergic, The Daily Beast, as well as various artist books.
ARTISTS WHO HAVE WORKED ON SPECIFIC OCCASIONS WITH PIÑATAS:
David Israel Reynoso - Piñata Theatre (2021)
David is an internationally-renowned, scenic, costume, and exhibit designer, as well as the Obie Award–winning costume designer of Punchdrunk's Sleep No More (New York and Shanghai).
The theatrical designer creates an immersive installation at The New Children's Museum, a celebration of theatre, created the structure for visitors to get lost or explore the sensation of feeling lost. The piece addresses the magic and ephemeral nature of theatre. Because of this, Reynoso decided to put piñata on it, as these pieces are only constructed to radiate beauty and fill with joy for a specific moment, which makes them truly special. The piñata canopy is one of the favourite parts of the theatre for visitors, as it features the work of City Heights piñata makers.
Josué Ramírez AKA Rawmirez-Orange Piñata Person (2021)
Josué Ramírez AKA Rawmirez is a multidisciplinary artist working in installation, craft, video and performance. Rawmirez lives in the Rio Grande Valley, along the Texas-Mexico border, and his current work investigates the relationships between personal identity and place, particularly 'the border', through references to popular culture, flora, traditional Mexican imagery, bilingualism, graffiti culture and pattern.
Mari Carson- Uterus Piñata (2021)
American costume and sound designer, she started making piñatas in 2014, when she was diagnosed with cervical cancer. The treatment was a radical hysterectomy, so in response, her friends organised a farewell party for her uterus. Carson made a uterus-shaped piñata and destroyed it as a symbolic gesture. Since then, she has created and sold versions of her unique version of the piñata to Etsy customers across the state.
Piñatas: The high art of celebration (2021)
Group exhibition at the Crafts in America museum curated by Emily Zaiden. It addressed the role they play in modern material culture and how they are made to embody social commentary, along with the ways in which artists approach piñatas as conceptual and technical starting points for their vision. The work of traditional piñata artisans is presented alongside the creations of artists who reinterpret the piñata through engaging sculptural practices. As creators of material culture, artisans design and construct the relics of our modern, everyday world. The contemporary artists featured in this exhibition reconsider techniques, materials, form, function and the notion of the piñata, forming a new language of expression.
Participating artists: Alejandro Arredondo, Diana Benavidez, Roberto Benavidez, Sita Bhaumik, Amorette Crespo, Dignicraft, Justin Favela, Francisco Palomares, Yesenia Prieto, Josue Ramirez, Isaias Rodriguez, Lorena Robledo, Ana Serrano, and Giovanni Valderas.
Rey Leonard Amorato- Piñata Room (2021)
Philippine-born designer who has included among his works a room full of piñatas at The Dessert Museum in Manila. One of the most unique museums in the country, with eight spaces, each of which has different themes featuring everyone's favourite desserts.
Francisco Palomares- Hold on papa (2020)
East Los Angeles-based artist discovered the magic of oil painting by flipping through books of classic artists. Studying the works of Rembrandt, Francisco de Goya and Diego De Velázquez, he was mesmerised by the way the paint strokes of a brush can bring people, places and things to life; it was magic in Palomares' young eyes.
Kourtrajmé - Jusqu'ici tout va bien (2020)
Twenty-five years after La Haine, and one year after the success of Les Misérables, the students of Kourtrajmé create bridges, at the Palays de Tokyo, between two stories that resonate more than ever in today's France. Police violence, the biased media and political view of the suburbs, the fashionable appropriation of the cultural codes of the street, the place of women in housing estates, and so on. The exhibition brings together some thirty plastic and video works, including a giant piñata in the shape of a police car, a video installation documenting the media's view of police violence, short films drawing parallels between La Haine and Les Miserables, and a series of portraits.
CasaMa- Burst (2019)
In collaboration with local organisations Paradais and Acá Estamos, a piñata workshop was produced in order to produce a visual imaginary to accompany the protest and demonstration activities at the rally on 8 March (International Women's Day, 2019). The workshop worked in two stages, the first one of conceptualisation of the ideas and the second one of production of the objects. A week after their construction, during the march, the piñatas were distributed among different activists to be collectively and exorcizingly burst in the public square at the end of the march.
Casa MA is a Costa Rican community that functions as a nomadic institution that works collaboratively, creating alliances with different organisations, foundations, museums, universities, among others. Thus generating a place for feminist research and the development of public community programmes.
Sculptor working with paper mache in Santa Fe, California. He makes things out of anything I can get my hands on: it beats spending money on the habit or sending things to the landfill.
I once read that the Chinese word for "paper" is the root of the word "civilisation" and "bureaucracy". Our material culture is built at the expense of the lives of countless trees and the exploitation of people, animals and the earth itself. It hurts! It is said that the by-products of a system (any organic organisation) are indicative of the health of the system (or lack thereof).
Santa Fe awakened in me a sensitivity for dry, brittle things and an appreciation for the colour brown. In my landscape work I try to heal many scars. In this series I recycle paper, artistic conventions and my neuroses in another effort to order and reassemble my world. One friend likes to tell me that the Buddha said "life is suffering". Another friend likes to tell me "he who laughs, lasts!"
Tony Macarena- ¿Original, pirata o piñata? (2019)
It's not design. TM
It's not a chair. TM
It's a piñata. TM
Original, pirate or piñata? is a queeratorial project that rethinks the status quo of design in Mexico using a common ritualistic assessment: make it a piñata. Piñatas are a peculiar, quasi-oxymoronic phenomenon of material culture. They are made to celebrate and designed to break. They venerate a symbol not only through their recreation but also through their destruction. Piñatas are a symbolic game.
A game that this exhibition intends to use to lay bare different problematics.
Charlotte Sagory-Various (2019-2017)
Charlotte Sagory develops a colourful and delicate universe from her Parisian studio, specialising in paper. Trained in fashion image in Lille, she joined the famous blogger Lisa Gachet who took her under her wing at Makemylemonade. It was then that she became passionate about paper, like a revelation. Charlotte cuts, folds, assembles, with no room for improvisation, a work of precision in which the child blossoms.
The Piñata Exhibit (Sure to be a Smash Hit!) (2017-2018)
Exhibition at the National Hispanic Cultural Center in Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA, celebrated this popular art form with over 175 examples from Mexico, California, Arizona, Nevada, Texas and New Mexico. Traditional and iconic works alongside the creations of contemporary piñata artists illustrated how piñatas maintain their historical and social significance while reflecting transnational shifts in popular, political and visual culture.
This antique China Poblana piñata from the 1930s was the inspiration for the exhibition.
Anna Benner- I'm not racist but / racist cactus piñata (2017)
Artist and filmmaker who likes to explore language, psychology and emotions in everyday life through animation, drawing, sculpture and humour.
The Graumalerei gallery, invited to participate in the Offenes Neukölln anti-racist festival, curated an exhibition around the theme of the cactus as an anti-Nazi symbol, inspired by posters used in local bars. The centrepiece of the exhibition consisted of two piñatas by Anna: one depicting a cartoon cactus character and the other a dialogue balloon with the phrases 'I'm not a racist, but' and 'some of my best friends are black'. The piñatas were intended as a mockery of these outdated clichés, as well as an invitation to reflect on the everyday racism in our language, and to consciously confront our own prejudices. It was also an opportunity to symbolically smash racism.
Jacobo Castellano -Piñata (2017)
The work of Jacobo Castellano, one of the contemporary Spanish artists with the most complex and solid language and iconography of his own, follows a defined line in which the recovery of memories stored in his memory leads to a profound reflection on essential themes such as identity, life and death.
Born in Jaén, trained in Granada, Castellano takes as the basis of his work the materials closest to his environment, with which he builds sculptures that speak to us of a suspended time, of the poetics of the found, the fortuitous, and where the elements of the urban ecosystem speak to us of memory and of the possible histories of the found material.
In his installation La Piñata de madera y lino, he takes as the basis of his work the materials closest to his environment, with which he builds sculptures that speak to us of a suspended time, of the poetics of the found, the fortuitous, and where the elements of the urban ecosystem speak to us of the memory and the possible histories of found matter.
Osman Khan's - The Allegory of the Horse (2017)
The MOCAD -Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit- asked more than 100 US-based artists to make new works from materials purchased only at dollar shops, with a total budget of $99 each for the "99 Cents or Less" exhibition.
Hanging in the main gallery space, Osman Khan builted a 13-foot donkey piñata he called The Allegory of the Horse after a Mongol story in which a high priest instructs survivors of a famine to sacrifice their horses in order to be showered with gifts from the gods. For Mr. Khan, his donkey-horse represents labor.
During the first week of August, the piñata bashed has opened and outed tumble an egg separator, graduation party favors, lawn ornaments, “all of the most useless things I could find,” Mr. Khan said. He sacrificed the horse — now, for the riches of the dollar store.
Amilcar Garcia- Piñata mujer (2016)
Piñata made with papier-mâché, paint, corn husks, tin tabs, white corn, thread, wire and costume jewellery for the exhibition "The Dream of America: Separation and Sacrifice in the Lives of North Country Latino Immigrants" at the Folklife Center in New York, USA. This exhibition takes us from the milking parlours of the surrounding counties to the cinder block homes of Coyula, Guadalajara, Mexico, and back again. This direct perspective asks us to consider without prejudice or stereotype, the work being done and the lives and sacrifices of the workers. Hard work and separation are underlying themes in the lives of these migrants.
Thedra Cullar-Ledford- Piñata smashing F**K CANCER (2016)
Artist Thedra Cullar-Ledford holded this performance at the opening reception of her exhibition "Lady Part Follies" in the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, USA. Cullar-Ledford invited a mastectomy survivor, other friends, and visitors to take a turn smashing the breast-shaped piñata hanging in her gallery space. The performance is a response to let everyone know how she feels about her breast cancer diagnosis, and her choice to have a double mastectomy and live the mantra “flat and fabulous.”
Edurne González Ibáñez- Doble Derrumbe (2016)
Doble Derrumbe explores the hybridisations between the still image and the moving image, as well as their possibilities beyond two-dimensionality. The aim is to construct multidirectional dynamics involving different systems of work production linked to the visual arts. To this end, it highlights the intertextual load that favours the transversal allusions of the contents, linking the context of the local with the universal, defining a position as an artist from which to operate in the era of the overproduction of images.
Edurne González Ibáñez is an artist, teacher and researcher, Doctor Cum Laude in Fine Arts from the UPV/EHU since 2013, where she currently works as an assistant lecturer in the Department of Sculpture and Art and Technology, she is also Vice-Dean of Cultural Extension of the Faculty of Fine Arts.
Sita Kuratomi- We are against the wall (2016)
Sita Kuratomi Bhaumik made the piñata Estamos contra el muro | We are against the wall in collaboration with Cece Carpio, La Pelanga, Norma Listman, People's Kitchen Collective, Piñatas Las Morenitas Martínez and Little Piñata Maker. Walls and borders are built to protect, segregate, detain and exercise power. Over the course of the exhibition, the wall will undergo a dramatic transformation that represents the dynamic transactional nature of border sites. Like other political walls, the piñatas beg to be torn down, pulverised by force and left as a fetishised relic of times past. Bhaumik's wall is not simply a narrative of division or a seductive solution to the problem of certain bodies. By questioning how one might be unknowingly complicit and unaware of its very construction, Bhaumik reminds us that, like these piñatas, all walls are constructed by hand.
Tony Spyra - Piñata (2015)
German artist based in Vienna, Austria. His area of work is very personal and very creative conceptual sculptures in which he usually fuses two everyday objects, but without the solemnity and presumptuousness that conceptual art tends to suffer from. In the Berlin exhibition at the Galerie Fridanormajeane, he made a piñata in the shape and characteristic orange colour of the German capital's litter bins: at the base, a hole let the sweets fall to the ground, an image that is often reproduced in reality, with rubbish instead of sweets.
Zaq Landsberg - Piñata II (2015)
Zaq Landsberg is a Brooklyn-based artist. He specialises in large-scale site-specific sculptures, absurdist objects and potentially treacherous conceptual art projects. Much of his work involves things that look like other things.
Franco Mondini-Ruiz - Modern Pinatas (2001 – 2014)
Franco Mondini-Ruiz's WindowWorks project, Modern Piñatas, presents a series of handmade papier-mâché replicas of seminal paintings and sculptures from the modernist era. The floating piñatas, inspired by works by great artists such as Piet Mondrian, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons, reference the commercialisation of popular icons. Through the use of the piñata, Mondini-Ruiz resituates the works in a Latin context, alluding to the cross-cultural appropriation of images. The installation comically combines the atmosphere of the gallery with a party atmosphere to question the reverence of high art. The artist's use of children's party props, constructed to be filled with sweets and beaten with a stick, heightens the distinction between precious material and everyday object.
Franco Mondini-Ruiz is an American artist of Mexican and Italian descent who lives and works in San Antonio, Texas and New York, New York. His work "challenges notions of preciousness and exclusivity in the art market while providing effervescent visual pleasure". Mondini-Ruiz takes a variety of approaches to creating art, working in installation, performance, painting, sculpture and storytelling.
Guillermo Galindo- Shell piñata (2014)
In 2012 Guillermo Galindo began working on Border Cantos, a collaborative project with Richard Misrach that has taken him along the border that divides Mexico and the United States, the most militarised region in North America. It was there that he began collecting discarded things. Small and large, the discarded objects are then transformed into instruments, devices that can ring out into the world. Empty bullet casings suspended from this soldered metal piñata form a tall ring, their brass tips singing each time the piñata is struck. These materials, like relics, speak of their past, as well as the imagined lives of the people who once possessed them.
An experimental composer, sound architect, performance artist and visual media artist, he redefines the conventional boundaries between music, the art of musical composition and the intersections between the disciplines of art, politics, humanitarian issues, spirituality and social consciousness.
Iván Argote- White cube piñata (2014)
A reflection on the minimal sculptural and also exhibition standards of installation, which goes through a recontextualisation by mixing this minimal form (the white cube) with the traditional piñata, an object commonly used in South America at birthday parties. The artist plays here with his own origins and cultural references, between two cultures, but also between two situations, the exhibition and the party. Something important is that the object, as happens with piñatas, is made to be broken during a celebration, so here, the White Cube is presented broken, inside it there are small sculptures, performance instructions and many other references and winks to art history, popular culture and even sentimental things.
Iván Argote, a Colombian artist based in Paris, explores with his work the relationship between history, politics and the construction of our own subjectivities. Argote's videos, sculptures, collages and installations in public space attempt to raise questions about how we relate to each other, to the state, to heritage and traditions. His works are critical, sometimes anti-institutional, which relate to the idea of bringing affects to politics, and politics to affects, with a strong and tender tone.
Sebastian Errazuriz- “XXth Century Capital" (2014)
Errazuriz made this giant golden piñata for the opening of the Wanted Design Fair in New York, scheduled to be broken days later in Industry City, Brooklyn.
Known by critics and the press as a "provocateur" and a "terrible child". Naturally, his piñata was not to be without layered symbolism and some controversy. Entitled "Capital of the 20th Century", the piñata was not only a representation of the golden calf worshipped in the Bible; it also closely resembled the Wall Street bull. Errázuriz proposed that, instead of being filled with candy, his piñata should be filled up the ass with real dollar notes.
His piece functions as a playful warning: the masses of people who will destroy the piñata as a symbol of capital will be the same ones who moments later will ironically be seen fighting for the fall of money. The piece, like many of Sebastian's works, offers several interpretations and here not only represents a critique of the capitalist system, but also offers a quick portrait of how greed can quickly affect us all.
Sarah Bay Williams- Game room (2012-2013)
For the closing event of the Hammer Museum's Game room exhibition, an exhibition of multiplayer, analogue and interactive games designed by contemporary artists. Visitors are invited to destroy a series of papier-mâché piñatas created by Williams, as part of the series Recreational Items of Unfortunate Events. Each piñata represents an unfortunate historical or contemporary event involving a game or competition, and according to Williams, "breaking them will thwart the misfortune and provoke a catharsis". Piñatas include a pack of cards (in memory of Jack Strauss, who won more than $750,000 in live poker tournaments), a shuttlecock (in celebration of Shon Seung-mo, a partially blind Olympic badminton silver medallist from South Korea) and a sailboat (commemorating the ill-fated Sydney to Hobart Yacht Race), to name a few examples. A narrator, Tabitha Christopher , accompanied Williams, reading the macabre anecdotal narratives related to each piñata and explaining the rules of the game.
After 2 p. m. and until 5 p. m., every half hour, one of the piñatas will be destroyed by willing volunteers, spilling toys, games and golden confetti, creating what the artist calls "an impossible moment when something brilliant is generated from something destroyed. "
Paola Pivi- Ok, you are better than me, so waht? (2013)
Paola Pivi often works with commonly identifiable objects that are modified to introduce a new scale, material or colour, challenging the audience to change their perspectives.
Animals are often protagonists in Pivi's world, from whom she takes on certain characteristics and instils human gestures and qualities.
Video art, in which, through the image of a child playing alone with a piñata on his birthday, the possibility of understanding bonds and personal relationships is raised.
A metaphor of the contemporary individual in a solitary celebration, in a celebration of individuality over the overwhelming world of the collective".
Create works that reference the built environment using brightly coloured cardboard and paper. While her work highlights the socio-cultural and architectural elements of urban life found in Latino neighbourhoods across the United States, it is very much inspired by her hometown of Los Angeles, California.
Elizabeth Mesa- Piñatas cubanoamericanas (2012)
In the early 1960s, his parents emigrated to the US from Cuba as political exiles, and in 2011 he travelled to Cuba for the first time with his family to visit Havana. Cuban-American Piñatas is a response to witnessing a sea of commodities, medicine and food that American visitors bring to Cuba in suitcases to help those who do not have access to needed items. Instead of candy, a mountain of personal items such as toothpaste, razors and socks lies on the floor among several suspended suitcases.
Banksy-Grand Terrace (2011)
Grand Terrace is Banksy's tribute to Rodney King, 20 years after the fact, as featured in Arts In The Streets, the Museum's retrospective dedicated to Graffiti and Street Art at MOCA in Los Angeles in 2011. It was a painted version of the Rodney King incident, using the videotape showing the brutality of the Los Angeles police who had violently beaten King. Except that in his version, Banksy has inserted a colourful "piñata" into the centre of the action.
Franz West-Epiphanie an Stühlen (2011)
Two chairs sit in front of a huge, goofy pink sculpture that hangs suspended from the ceiling like an asteroid, a giant virus or a Sputnik, with long arms sticking out into space. Should we talk to it, just be in its presence or wait for instructions?
James Sefhik- American piñata Starry night (2012)
This series subverts the festive nature of the modern use of piñatas with an intriguing and often unexploded deadly payload of cluster bombs. It mixes bombs with the traditional prizes and sweets of a piñata to highlight the continued U.S. use of cluster munitions used in Yemen in 2009. They relate the collateral damage that children living in distant lands often receive when they encounter these strange "knick-knacks" on the ground.
James Shefhik perverts themes and materials. He does this with common everyday objects (chair, matches, gun), in different dimensions, media and numbers. The finish of the object is kept minimal, realistic but obsessively detailed to focus the viewers' interest and attention. Another aspect of the painstaking quality of each piece is a rebuttal to the landscape of digital instant gratification and the short attention span prevalent in the early 21st century. His work is inspired in part by the political and cultural climate that was created in the West to justify the pre-emptive war against the sovereign nation of Iraq in 2003. He is also intrigued by the question of where the overall responsibility for the violence in his country lies, society lies.
Between contemporary design and popular tradition. Piñatarama is the product of the curiosity of several designers who, fascinated by the diversity of characters that invade popular markets, were seduced by an idea: to see their designs and characters turned into papier-mâché giants. This project seeks to surprise us with the unexpected results that arise from the interpretation that a group of Mexican artisans made of the characters created by artists, illustrators and designers from Mexico and the world, among them Mar Hernández, professor of the Department of Drawing. The exhibition offers the spectator a journey through a particular installation, where 40 piñatas reflect the appropriation of an object culturally rooted in Mexico to return it reinterpreted in a contemporary piece.
Artists: Alberto Cerriteño (Mexico/Canada), Allan Sieber (Brazil), Buque (Mexico), Cecilia Meade (Mexico), Daniel Berman (Mexico), David Gamez (Mexico), Dhear (Mexico), Diego Bianki (Argentina/Uruguay), Dr. Kone (Mexico), Maxi Luchini (Argentina/Spain), Motomichi Nakamura (Japan), News (Mexico), Pachiclón (Mexico), Pum Pum (Argentina), Rilla Alexander (Australia/Germany), Sandra Equihua (Mexico/USA), Saner (Mexico), Sergio Mora (Spain), Sindiso Nyoni (South Africa), Smithe (Mexico), Super Macho (Mexico/USA), Roxy Love (Mexico), 1000Changos (Mexico).
Piñateros: Ricardo Linares, Lorenzo García and Marcial García Piñatarama is a joint project by Cecilia Meade, David Gamez, Clarisa Moura and Dr. Alderete.
Jennifer Rubell- Andy Warhol (2010)
"Warhol Piñata" was part of Jennifer Rubell's participatory performance Icons at the Brooklyn Museum. The work was approximately seven metres high and participants were encouraged to destroy it with baseball bats. Inside were iconic American packaged desserts such as Twinkies and Ding Dongs, the kind of traditional sweets Andy Warhol revered. "The piece was constructed to be a catharsis," explains Rubell, "The joyful destruction of the most important American artist of our time. By the end of the show, people were resting inside the piñata and swinging from the rafters. The king was dead.
Blanka Amezkua y Ronny Quevedo- Rompe Puesto (2010)
ROMPE PUESTO, was a one-night celebration event proposed by Blanca Amezkua and Ronny Quevedo who invited 22 piñatas created by New York City artists to be broken. In this setting, the artists and organisers used the cathartic act of celebration to foster new alternatives for exhibiting, performing, congregating and collaborating.
ARTISTS: Damali Abrams, Fanny Allie & Jun Aizaki, Blanka Amezkua, Firelei Baez, Petrushka Bazin "Front Unifié de Libération Nationale d'Haïti (FULNH)", Daniel Bejar, Melissa A. Calderón, Alex Campaz, Brendan Carroll, Abigail Deville, Oasa Duverney, Michelle Frick, Guadalupe Maravilla Iván Monforte, Las Hermanas Iglesias, Laura Napier, Juan Ortega, Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz , Olek, Risa Puno, Kenia (Robinson), Jorge Rojas, Jessica Rosen, Ronny Quevedo, Mary Valverde.
Brian Dick & Christen Sperry-Garcia (2010)
Brian Dick in collaboration with Christen Sperry-Garcia, realised a large-scale piñata of recycled cardboard, newspaper, tissue paper, staples - executed by Piñata World - at the Orange County Museum of Art as part of the exhibition "OCMAscot and Glowfittie Room" at the California Biennial.
Piñatarama is a project led by Cecilia Meade, David Gámez with the help of Galería Vértigo in Mexico City. In which piñatas created by designers and illustrators were exhibited, thus achieving an exhibition with 25 pieces, each with its own identity, colour, shape and texture, since the initial intention of the project was to give life to characters, (both collective and individual), through the use of the piñata, and not only as an object of child destruction, but as a type of sculpture/medium.
GUEST DESIGNERS: Allan Sieber / BRAZIL Apak / USA. Ben Newman / ENGLAND. Cecy Meade / MEXICO. Cristian Turdera / ARGENTINA. Cupco / AUSTRALIA. Daniel Berman / MEXICO. David Gamez / MEXICO. Dr. Alderete / ARGENTINA - MEXICO. Ed Carosia / ARGENTINA - SPAIN. Gastón Caba / ARGENTINA. Griselda Ojeda / MEXICO. Jim Plukart / COLOMBIA. Lady Love / MEXICO. Lou Lou and Tummie / DUTCH. Malota / SPAIN. Maxi Luchini / ARGENTINA - SPAIN. Pachiclon / MEXICO. Pum Pum / ARGENTINA. Rilla Alexander / AUSTRALIA - GERMANY. Snaggs / USA. Sonni / ARGENTINA. Stephan Britt / USA. TADO / ENGLAND. 1000Changos / MEXICO
Aaron Krach-Indestructible Object (2009)
The ceremonial destruction of an artist's piñata usually corresponds with the closing of an exhibition. The copper leaf donkey was smashed at the grand opening of the gallery Invisible Exports last year. The shredded shell was displayed on plexiglass for the remainder of the show. Krach is very interested in objects you can't keep. Or if you keep it, "you have to recognise that it changes". He explains: "A scratched lottery ticket that doesn't offer a prize. Is it useless? It's still the same piece of paper at an elementary level. The same with a piñata. It's still sculptural and interesting, but it's been 'destroyed' in the eyes of most viewers. I want to subvert that.
Abel Saucedo- "Ciudad Juárez es la 1" (2009)
Named after Juan Gabriel's song, this piece describes the violent drug war that began when Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán's cartel moved into the city of Juárez. Drug-related violence brutally claimed the lives of so many. Between the years 2008 -2011 alone, there were 9578 murders. Naming Juarez the most dangerous city in the world.
Abel Saucedo is from El Paso, TX, which borders CD. Juarez, Mexico. Saucedo makes art a responsibility, sound images that portray everyday situations from his communal dichotomy as an agent of social, cultural and political commentary.
Mariana Castillo Deball- Klein bottle piñata (2009)
Created for the travelling exhibition For the blind man in the darkroom looking for the black cat that is not organised by the Contemporary Art Museum of St. Louis. Hanging in austere museum lobbies, the piñata looks more like a semi-precious kinetic sculpture than a party piece filled with goodies. Its colour and title hint at the deep blue hue developed by French artist Yves Klein, while the shape refers to the "bottle" attributed to the 19th century German mathematician Felix Klein. In short, Klein's bottle is a topological surface without interior or exterior. "It is a container that has no content, or no possibility of having content," says the artist. Klein's bottle piñata was born out of a lecture-style performance about black boxing and how greater sophistication of knowledge makes technology more cryptic to its users.
Michael Velliquette - Power Tower (2009)
Artist whose intricately constructed works on paper combine an aesthetic of abundance with an inventive formalism that powerfully remind us of piñatas even though they are not. Her choice to work with paper is a conscious decision to use a humble, everyday material to open up a vision of imagined worlds. By foregrounding its texture, weight and form, Velliquette highlights its essential physical qualities and its ephemeral character.
Active for 20 years, Velliquette has participated in over 150 exhibitions in museums and galleries in the United States, Europe and Asia. His work is in the permanent collections of the Chazen Museum of Art, the South Texas Museum of Art, the Racine Art Museum, The Progressive Corporation, the John Michael Kohler Art Center and the Microsoft Collection. He has participated in residencies and cultural exchange programmes, including the Artpace International Artist-in-Residence; the SÍM Residency, Reykjavik; the John Michael Kohler Art/Industry programme; and EUARCA, Kassel, Germany. In 2021 he was artist-in-residence at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft.
His work has appeared in numerous print and online publications, including Colossal, Time Out New York and The New York Times. He has been included in several compendiums on paper art produced by publishers such as Thames & Hudson, Gestalten, Sandu, Lark Crafts, Hightone Books.
Zaq Landsberg is a Californian artist based in Brooklyn, USA. He specialises in large-scale site-specific sculptures, absurdist objects and potentially treacherous conceptual art projects. Much of his work involves things that look like other things.
Meg Cranston- Magical Death (2003)
Five portraits of the artist as a piñata. Papier-mâché maquettes of the artist herself, "dressed" in colourful fabric ensembles (striped trousers, red shorts, shod in boots or adorned with an elaborate headdress) hung from the ceiling in a variety of poses. Made by Cranston with the help of her art students, the pieces represented an almost sincere attempt to portray her physically, as well as a direct parody of the artist's cult.
Teresa Serrano- La piñata (2013)
Dave McKenzie- Selfprotrait piñata (2002)
Dave McKenzie uses figures such as bobbleheads, Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade balloons and piñatas to broaden our understanding of self-portraiture. For McKenzie, self-portraiture is not just an exercise in creating an image of oneself, but a look at what the portrait can make of oneself: an icon, a caricature, a celebrity, a collector's item, or a public figure. Here, their image is transformed into a piñata, something destined to be destroyed. Resembling at first glance a fun party activity, the work soon takes a sinister turn, becoming a portrait of simulated racial violence.
Chuck Ramírez- Piñata series (2002)
In his series Piñata (2002), Ramírez focuses on complex narrative use: each image focuses on the material detritus of a past event and shows the swept away and the abandoned. Ramírez's photographic technique in the Piñata series and elsewhere employs an almost molecular approach and a light that is both ruthless and exalting. With an initial burst of colour, the comic intent of each party sculpture comes through easily. But each limb and torn paper frill, each glimpse of lanky wooden skeleton and lump of newspaper stuffing suggests a deep pathos behind the first impressions of humour. In lesser hands, a series of photos of freshly battered piñatas might have acquired all the lightness and slippery irreverence of a kitschy Mexicanism. It could have come off sentimental. For Ramírez, however, his worldview lies in the details; he presents the piñatas not with a pop, but with subversive seriousness.
Gary Baseman- I am your piñata (2002)
American artist who investigates history, heritage and the human condition (especially love, longing and loss). Through iconography and visual narratives that celebrate "the beauty of life's bittersweetness," his work bridges the worlds of popular culture and fine art, immediately recognizable and immensely personal.
In his series of oil on canvas "I am your piñata" he used it as a metaphor to represent the celebration and pain of life. Inviting us not to be afraid to express ourselves for fear of being hit by the big stick of life.
Roberto Salas- Piñatas encantadas (1997)
Piñatas Encantadas represents the collaborative visions of artist Roberto Salas, piñata artisans Rosaleo Hernandez of Tijuana, Ms. Leonor Ochoa, Mari Rodriguez and Gabriela Gonzalez of San Diego. Workshops held in Balboa Park in San Diego, California, under the guidance of the artist and the artisans invited students and community members to design and create piñatas that are also included in the exhibition. Together, they reinvented the history and mythology of the Mexican piñata, celebrated its tradition and reveled in its grandeur.
Meyer Vaisman- Untitled Turkey XVIII La Pinata (1992)
Of Venezuelan origin, in the 80s and 90s he was very influential in the New York scene of Post-apropriationism, neo-abstract Simulationism and Neo Geo, whose aesthetics were defined by Hal Foster as "the aesthetics of cynical reason". Despite this, Vaisman will critically confront the very scene in which he was formed, which differentiates his production from that of the other members, who remain on a more commercial level, such as Jeff Koons. This has made his work less known to the general public and more controversial for certain critics.
Mathias Goeritz-Sculpture Piñata (1981)
A critical figure in the development of modern art in post-war Latin America, he developed the principle of "emotional architecture". The unique perspective considers spaces and objects that are produced to provoke empathy and celebrates collaboration rather than functionalism and individual authorship. After emigrating to Mexico from Spain in 1949, Goeritz opened the Museo Experimental El Eco. The institution served as the embodiment of these principles, facilitating collaboration and expanding existing notions of patronage. Best known for large-scale totemic sculptures such as Moses and Heads, Goeritz worked in a style that prefigured Minimalism for 10 years.
