Nicario Jiménez Quispe’s fingers are coated in white as they deftly shape doughy balls of powdery material into sculptures no bigger than his thumb. In his Naples studio, with its verdant wraparound porch and nearby garden, filled with yuca and tomato plants, the artist mounts the figures into festively painted boxes to create his retablos, three-dimensional artworks recalling Latin American altarpieces.
The foundation for Nicario’s retablos, an ancestral craft learned from his grandfather and father, stems from his Peruvian heritage. While most Hispanic cultures have some form of retablos—typically two-dimensional, devotional paintings housed within a painted box—the versions from Nicario’s native Andean village of Alcamenca, in the Ayacucho region, are filled with intricate, sculptural scenes blending colonial Catholic imagery with Indigenous Wamani religion. During Nicario’s childhood, neighbors would call on his grandfather, the village retablo maker, to craft icons of Saint Mark to be used in twice-yearly fertility rituals for herds of cattle, llamas and donkeys. “They served a purpose,” Nicario says. “It wasn’t commercial. The practices were always about duality: wintertime and summertime, planting and harvesting.”
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Photography by Brian Tietz
Nicario Jiménez Quispe day of the dead upclose
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Photography by Brian Tietz
nicario quispe retablo art guitar
From his Naples home studio, Nicario crafts retablos (a Latin American artform) with social commentary and an autobiographical lens.
In his Golden Gate Estates home studio, the trilingual artist (his native Quechua, Spanish and some English) carries on the techniques and whimsy of his family’s artform but deviates distinctly from their traditional content. Nicario narrows in on social and cultural themes, creating windows into Andean life through folksy vignettes and representations of the stories he learned as a child—part of his village’s tradition of oral history. He also explores themes of guerilla violence and political unrest in Peru, and since moving to the United States, has dug into American history and civil rights struggles, past and present.
In Years of Struggle (on display at The National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis), Nicario depicts chilling, violent altercations among American police, Confederate flag-wielding mobs and groups of peaceful protesters holding signs that read “I AM A MAN.” Meanwhile, in La Pishtaco—considered by many professors and scholars to be his magnum opus—Nicario explores the namesake Quechua legend through three time periods, showing how a mythical figure who kills Indigenous peoples for their fat evolves as a metaphor for colonialism.
Each retablo encases a microcosm of one of the myriad stops on Nicario’s journey from Ayacucho to the United States—whether based on a personal experience or something resonant he witnessed. Many of his more playful scenes, such as Bar Sal Si Puedes, channel his hometown’s neighborhood bar. “When I make a bar, everybody is laughing and playing—I add humor: One person is drunk and vomiting. The sign says no smoking; everybody smokes. Someone in the corner had too much to drink, and he’s peeing,” Nicario says with a genial laugh.
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Photography by Brian Tietz
Nicario Jiménez Quispe’s Day of the Dead, A Walk in the City (2023)
Nicario learned the craft from his father and grandfather, who developed a new style for retablos with 3D scenes made from a mixture of cooked potatoes and plaster. Each box—which Nicario calls “sophisticated folk art”—contains its own world, expressively detailing places he remembers from his life or stories he heard growing up among the oral history-rich Incan culture.
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Photography by Brian Tietz
Nicario Jiménez Quispe’s in his studio space
Immigration is a common theme for the artist, whose work captures the untethered rhythms of his experience moving from a tight-knit, agricultural village to a big city as an adolescent. Other socially minded works, like Immigration: The Beast, The Freight Train (pictured at the top), focus on the plight of immigrants and refugees, with a blend of desperation, apathy, cruelty and hope depicted in striking emotional detail.
Doors open like stage curtains, revealing miniature sets rife with color, depth and detail. Whole villages come to life, complete with gesturing hands, emotive faces shielded by hats and stocked cantina shelves. You can almost hear the sound of miniscule chairs scraping bar floors. Nicario’s retablos encourage the viewer to gaze in on countless characters and props packed into the diorama-like pieces he describes as “sophisticated folk art in the form of portable boxes.”
The pasty, clay-like material caked onto the artist’s hands—a mixture of cooked potatoes and plaster—is a Jiménez family recipe dubbed ideal by his grandfather for the consistency created by starchy and abundant potatoes. “In a small village, we don’t have a Home Depot. It’s only everything natural,” Nicario says. The artist pinches and prods the pliable, quick-drying material into shape using spartan tools: a knife; a small, thin stick; and his fingers—devices repeatedly dunked into plaster in a nimble dance to avoid marring the delicate forms while sculpting with the sticky substance.
Photography by Brian Tietz
Photography by Brian Tietz
Photography by Brian Tietz
Photography by Brian Tietz
Photography by Brian Tietz
Photography by Brian Tietz
Photography by Brian Tietz
Photography by Brian Tietz
Nicario doesn’t bother sketching out his designs ahead of time; they’re already laid out in his head. Each expressive figure receives a couple of broad coats of acrylic paint before Nicario adds eyes, noses and wardrobe stitching with a fine-tipped brush. “My grandfather’s painting was very primitive, using natural pigments,” he says. Nicario’s father was the first to branch into acrylic paint, using primary colors to distinguish features (red for herds and blood, blue skies, green agriculture, yellow sand). For many years, Nicario followed this example, but when he moved to Naples, the artist started incorporating a wider palette reflective of the styles he found locally.
Pieces are varnished to protect and enhance the colors’ depth, and the wooden boxes are coated with a layer of plaster and glue, providing a secure, smooth surface for his chromatic floral patterns evocative of traditional Andean motifs. These archival methods pay off, as proven by the still-sturdy state of the retablos his grandfather made a century ago. “I have a display here in my studio of my grandfather’s pieces, my father’s pieces, and I keep my big pieces here,” he says. Though a little battered, the colors of his grandfather’s works still blaze.
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Photography by Brian Tietz
Nicario Jiménez Quispe’s retablo in the making
Nicario’s retablos are regarded as invaluable anthropological lenses into Peru’s Indigenous culture. His work has appeared in books and at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.; he’s also a regular on the art fair and university lecture circuits.
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Photography by Brian Tietz
Nicario Jiménez Quispe’s The Day of the Dead, The Bar (2018)
Nicario Jiménez Quispe’s The Day of the Dead, The Bar (2018)
Nicario’s father began the family’s separation from what Nicario describes as the region’s “magical-religious” imagery when he moved the family to the region’s city center in 1968. Here, Nicario would make retablos for sale alongside his father, catering to tourist markets with nativity scenes and cactus fruit harvests. Meanwhile, Nicario struggled with the transition to city life, a dynamic that only increased when he was forced to move to the much larger capital city, Lima, in 1980 to flee guerilla violence in Ayacucho. “I’m an immigrant from the mountains, from the highlands. In a small village, you have everything—it’s all family. When we moved to the city, everyone was speaking Spanish. In my village, it’s all Quechua, an Incan language. It’s a different culture,” he says. “I saw a lot of things: controversy, politics, corruption.”
Then a young man in his early 20s, Nicario encapsulated his feelings of isolation and cultural detachment in works like Life Between Two Worlds, a side-by-side comparison between the community-centric, agricultural landscape of village life with the traffic-filled streets of Lima. This piece was the first—but far from the last—to catch international attention. University of Miami professor Steve Stein stumbled across Nicario’s work in a Lima gallery and was fascinated by the artist’s use of a traditional artform—whose creators most often go unnamed—with contemporary subjects. Steve went on to write a book about Nicario’s retablos and their role as invaluable anthropological lenses into modern-day indigeneity.
In the years that followed, Nicario became a regular on the university circuit, speaking at colleges in New York, Washington, Massachusetts, and beyond. In 1992, Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, D.C., commissioned Nicario to create a retablo for its Seeds of Change: 500 Years of Encounter & Exchange exhibition, which highlighted the relationship between North and South American cultures and communities on the 500-year anniversary of Columbus arriving in the New World.
Now well into his 60s, Nicario still travels for art fairs and museum shows, sharing the spirit of Andean oral history and tradition through his work. But at home with his wife and daughter, the artist lives a quiet life. He wakes up early and works in his studio, taking breaks to tend his garden. “It’s like therapy for me,” he says. He may be far from where he started, but his village is only a plane ride away.
There’s been one constant throughout Nicario’s journey: He’s always sculpted his wondrous boxes. “My retablos serve as reflections of the spectrum of human emotions and experiences,” he says. “I aim to capture the essence of everyday life.”