Shrines of Life

For a century, the Jimenez-Quispe family have created retablos that are celebrated around the world. Third-generation artist, Claudio Jimenez-Quispe, tells us about his retablos, his life, and how the two are inseparable.

Words and photos by Erin Spens

In the 1980s and 90s the Maoist guerilla group known as The Shining Path obliterated parts of Peru on a mission to overthrow the government and institute a communist peasant-revolutionary system. The Ayacucho region was a main base for The Shining Path and was one of the first areas they gained control of through unthinkable violence. Beheadings, bombings, murders and massacres of entire villages were their tactics; women, children and innocent village people who rejected their ideologies were their victims. These decades of slash-and-burn violence ended in an estimated 70,000 deaths.

In the Ayacucho region, an artist named Claudio Jimenez-Quispe was gaining recognition for elaborate retablos that he first began making with his father at the age of 4. For a living, Claudio’s father Don Florentino Jimenez restored and preserved artwork and altarpieces in local churches, and he created retablos at home — two lines of work that have been passed down through the Jimenez…