Nicario Jiménez Quispe

Nicario Jiménez Quispe (born in 1957) is a Peruvian-American maker of the Peruvian retablo or the retablo ayacuchano.

He was born in the village of Alcamenca in Ayacucho, Peru, high in the Andes mountain range.

Life Nicario Jiménez Quispe (Quispe is his mother’s name) is a master artisan of the craft of making retablos. He was born 1957 in a small highland Andean village near Ayacucho.

He has attended the University of San Marcos in Lima, and other universities in Peru,studying sculpture. He is a fourth generation retablo artist, and the family trade goes back to his father, grandfather, and his great-grandfather, which he has felt the attraction to from an early age, and he crafted his first piece at the age of 5 or 6.

Political violence and the fighting between the Peruvian Army and the Marxist Sendero Luminoso (“Shining Path”) guerrillas around Ayacucho has forced many peasant families lie his in the area to migrate to the capital city of Lima, where they make and sell their crafts commercially.

A decade after moving, Nicario Jiménez had his first chance to display his retablos alongside those of his father in a Lima gallery. The quality of and unique style of his work quickly caught the attention of many Peruvian and foreign connoisseurs of retablo folk art. In 1986 he opened his own workshop-gallery in Lima.

He has exhibited his retablos in museums and galleries in Peru and abroad. He has lived back and forth between his home country and the United States during the 1980s, until finally settling in Naples, Florida.

In 2012, he was the recipient of a Florida Folk Heritage Award.

His work has appeared in major museum exhibitions, including the Smithsonian Institution where they are part of the permanent collection. Nicario has taught at universities and international conferences, and his work is in many prestigious art collections. Through his works, Nicario Jimenez, the "artist of the Andes," has shared the art form of the altarpiece with audiences around the world.

Work He makes traditional Andean altarpieces, small wooden boxes filled with figures, animals and other objects that tell a story. His altarpiece figurines are made by hand with a mix of boiled potato and gypsum powder.

His altarpieces represent religious, historical and everyday life events. They can be humorous or political. His works are based on their pre-Hispanic Andean art and family influences. The piece "Pishtaco" by Nicario (which exists in multiple copies of different make) is three-tiered, and the middle tiers is a throw-back to the 1960s with hacendado on horseback, also showing automobile and airplane (of models from that age) . The military aircraft symbolize state authority, or perhaps the dominant group.

The top tier of the retablo represents the Colonial period and shows the Pishtaco dressed as a Franciscan monks who extract human fat to make church bells.

The middle tier shows a period around the 1960s as aforementioned,