♪♪ Roberto: I would love for people to think beyond the piñata as just being a game.

♪♪ It's a medium that can be as complex and rich as the maker wants it to be... ♪♪ and, for me, just being open to the impossible allows you to pursue things you normally wouldn't.

Catherine: Love the installation.

Roberto: Thank you.

Catherine: You happy with it?

Roberto: Yeah.

I'm very happy with it.

Catherine: Piñatas are ephemeral.

You're supposed to destroy them, but not Roberto's piñatas.

These are works of sculpture created in paper.

My favorite element-- the little, raised bits of his foot.

Roberto: Oh, sure.

Catherine: You can feel him climbing.

Roberto: Right.

Yeah.

It gives it kind of a gesture and movement.

Catherine: Yeah.

Phoebe: Roberto's work is in a medium that we all recognize and understand and can relate to, even though he's doing it completely in his own way with this incredibly high level of craftsmanship and artistry.

♪♪ Roberto: The weasel is from a medieval manuscript.

Pairing it with this Bosch figure, I really like the interplay between the two.

It's very playful.

Catherine: He has used Hieronymus Bosch's 16th-century painting "The Garden of Earthly Delights" over and over again as source material for his piñatas.

♪♪ Roberto: It's believed to be religious in nature, and it's about the progression of man from innocent to sin.

♪♪ Catherine: And it's populated with this phantasmagoria of these crazy, fantastic beings, invented things, and so he takes those images and brings them to life.

Roberto: These are prints from "The Garden of Earthly Delights."

I usually just print off the image of the creature that I want to make, and this is a bear from the current exhibition.

This is a Bosch three-headed bird that I will eventually make.

I went down this path of creatures and people from the Bosch painting, but because of this religious underlying theme of the painting and the religious nature of the history of the piñata, it was fun for me to tie those two together.

This figure is holding a red berry up to this bird.

♪♪ I turned the berry into a star piñata, and that star piñata is piercing the hands and the feet, where Jesus was nailed to the cross.

The name came, "Stigmata Piñata," and once that came into my head, I just couldn't leave it alone, so it had to come to fruition.

Catherine: It's unusual to find a really new creative expression, and Roberto has that.

♪♪ Roberto: I grew up in rural South Texas on a ranch, a very big family, and we were very poor.

My dad identifies as Mexican.

My mom is Anglo.

I am highly aware of my being biracial.

I think I have always wanted to be an artist, but I was afraid that I didn't have what it took or didn't have that talent, but I started playing with FIMO, which is a polymer clay that you bake in your oven, and I started making these mushroom figurines.

When I moved out to California, I started taking night classes at Pasadena City College, so I pursued a body of work in bronze, but I realized just how expensive that medium could be, and that's when I stumbled upon the piñata.

So this is piñata number one.

I made it for my husband's 40th birthday.

It was my first attempt at a piñata.

It really forced me to jump headlong into this medium, and I'm so glad because I haven't stopped since.

♪♪ I am drawn to a medieval manuscript called the "Luttrell Psalter."

Catherine: Illuminated manuscripts are handmade books from about 1100 to 1600 decorated often with kooky, again, fantastic beasts.

♪♪ Roberto: With this particular one, the body is a piñata, what you'd see at a party, but the head is a medieval monster, and the scarf was part of that creature.

♪♪ To me, it was absurd and ridiculous to have a scarf on a piñata.

Catherine: And, of course, you're gonna have people wanting to pet him.

Roberto: Oh, yeah, for sure.

Medieval manuscript creatures that I combine with piñata motifs, it was kind of an allusion to my mixed-race background, so a lot of my work kind of references myself.

♪♪ So many.

Monte: Yeah.

Roberto: Growing up, I never imagined that I would be out or that I would be married to somebody that I love.

OK. Ha ha ha!

Monte: I'm so proud of him for finding his inspiration and sticking to it.

Roberto: I don't know.

I still think it's better without it.

Monte: I'm sure it is, but...

I love living with the pieces, too.

I love living with the creatures in the home.

Sometimes if they're not on exhibit or they haven't been purchased, they're here with us for a while.

Roberto: You know, we live in a default-heterosexual world, so one of the interesting things about my birds is, I say all of them are gay, so I started a series of depictions of same-sex couplings of birds.

[Blows] I use what I knew as a kid to be the piñata technique, so the first stage is taking balloons as your base and covering that with papier-mââché.

♪♪ From there, I build out those papier-mâché balloon forms using paperboard.

♪♪ I'm making a gynandromorph cardinal, which means it is genetically both male and female.

♪♪ The way that gynandromorphs display that mutation is, one side is male and the other side is female, and if the male and female plumage looks different, then it is split down the middle.

♪♪ When I first started making piñatas, I realized how translucent the crepe paper was and how you can really shift color around, so I really wanted to play with the aspect of what I call painting with paper.

♪♪ One thing about birds, their feathers are quite iridescent, so I try to capture that quality by layering the metallic papers underneath just so there's a slight glint.

♪♪ Phoebe: All of Roberto's work is interrelated.

♪♪ Even if it's coming from these disparate sources, they all kind of come back to him.

They all come back to us.

They all are in the same garden.

It's just magic.

♪♪