The Craft Map

One craft, one city, and a lineage that can be traced by name through a single twentieth-century figure. There is no protective mark and none is needed, because attribution here is normal.

Ayacucho

In the southern Peruvian highlands, the city and the families in it hold the retablo tradition: hinged painted boxes filled with figures modelled from potato flour and plaster. The form descends from the portable cajón de San Marcos of the herding country and was widened in subject by Joaquín López Antay, whose national prize in 1975 forced a public argument about whether a craftsman could be an artist. A record should carry the maker and the family, both of which are known and neither of which is difficult to obtain.

The Conflict Retablos

A distinct and serious body of work from the late nineteen eighties onward records the violence of Peru's internal armed conflict, made by retablistas from the affected region using the same technique. These belong on the map as a category of their own. They are documentation before they are decoration, they are held substantially by memory institutions, and a record of one should state its subject plainly rather than describing it as a scene of Andean life.

Lima

The capital holds the memory institutions where the conflict retablos are collected and exhibited, and it is where the 1975 national prize argument about whether a retablista could be an artist was conducted. A piece from the conflict category is very often best understood against that collection rather than in a gallery, because the institutional framing is part of what the object was made to do.

Also on the Map

The herding country around the city, where the original boxes were used at marking time and where a few are still used that way. The house museum maintained by López Antay's family, which is the reference for what the form looked like when it changed. And the potato-flour and plaster paste the figures are modelled from, which sets hard, takes paint cleanly and is the reason a whole populated scene can sit inside a hinged box the size of a book. Which maker, and then which subject: on this map the second answer determines what kind of object you are holding.

A Box That Travelled

The ancestor of the retablo is the cajón de San Marcos, a portable wooden case with hinged doors, holding modelled figures in tiers, carried by herders and used in the rituals of livestock marking in the Andean highlands. It was religious equipment for people who moved. Everything about it, the scale, the doors, the tiered interior, follows from that: it had to close, survive a journey, and open into a complete scene wherever it was set down. It is a portable chapel, sized for a saddlebag.

The Man Who Changed What It Held

Joaquín López Antay took that object and widened its subject. Under his hands the box kept its form and its technique but filled with festivals, markets, workshops, musicians and the ordinary business of Andean life alongside the saints. That shift, from a devotional container to a general one, is the whole modern history of the craft, and it happened within a single working lifetime in one town. Every retablo made since, on any subject, descends from that decision, which is an unusually clean line of descent for a craft to have.

1975, and the Argument About Art

When López Antay was awarded the Premio Nacional de Cultura in 1975 the reaction was fierce. It was the first time the prize had gone to a craftsman rather than to a painter or sculptor, and the Peruvian association of visual artists led a public campaign against it, arguing among other things that he merely repeated inherited models. The award stood. It is worth recording because the question it forced, whether a maker working in a traditional form can be an artist, is exactly the question this entire collection sits on top of, and Peru had it out loudly in public half a century ago. The prize is now remembered as the moment popular art was admitted to the national canon, which is not how it felt at the time.

What the Boxes Recorded Next

Peru's internal armed conflict ran from 1980 to 2000 and Ayacucho was its centre. In the later nineteen eighties, at the worst of it, retablistas began using the form to record what was being done in the countryside: massacres, disappearances, displacement, the arrival of armed men in villages. Edilberto Jiménez Quispe's series is the best known. The technique was unchanged, potato-flour paste figures in a painted box, and the content was material that news reporting could not safely carry. A devotional object became a form of testimony.

Why a Box, and Why Tiers

The structure is doing work that a picture could not. A retablo shows several things happening at once, on levels, inside a single frame that closes: an upper register for the sacred or the authoritative and a lower one for the human and the everyday, with the two visible together. That arrangement lets a maker state a relationship rather than a scene, which is precisely why the form adapted so readily first to festival subjects and then to testimony. A box that was built to show saints above and herders below could show soldiers above and villagers below without altering anything but the figures.

The Patron Institution

The original patron was the herding household and its ritual year. That patronage has largely gone, and what replaced it is a market for retablos as art, domestic and international, together with institutional collecting by museums and by memory projects concerned with the conflict. The craft therefore now serves three quite different buyers, and a retablo made for a collector, one made for a memorial institution and one made for a household altar are different objects that happen to share a technique.

Potato Flour and Plaster

The figures are modelled from a paste of potato flour and plaster, which dries hard, takes fine detail at very small scale and accepts paint readily. The box is wood, hinged, and painted outside in bright floral panels. The material is worth knowing because it is cheap, local and unglamorous, and because the standard of modelling achieved with it, at figures a centimetre or two high, is the thing that separates a serious retablo from a decorative one. Everything here is judged at a scale most crafts never attempt.

Arts, Crafts and Living Ateliers

A retablo workshop is a table, a box of pigments and a great many small figures at various stages of drying. The work is entirely at small scale and is done seated, with the modelling of individual figures separated from the painting of the case and the final assembly of the scene inside it. Families work together, often across generations, and the division of labour within a household is usual rather than exceptional, which is why a single name on a piece frequently stands for several pairs of hands.

Reading a Retablo

Open it and look at the figures rather than the box. Modelling quality shows in the hands, the faces and the posture at a scale where most makers simplify; good work keeps individual gesture legible at a centimetre. Look at how the scene is composed in tiers and whether the levels relate to one another or are simply stacked. Then look at the outside, since the painted floral panels are where speed shows first. And ask who made it, because in this craft the makers are named, the families are known, and attribution is normal rather than exceptional.

Subject, and What It Tells You

Subject is the fastest guide to what a piece is. Saints and the livestock-marking scenes belong to the oldest layer. Festivals, markets, workshops and musicians belong to the tradition López Antay opened. Conflict subjects belong to a specific and serious body of work from the nineteen eighties onward and should not be treated as a picturesque variant; they are documentation. A workshop producing all three does so knowingly, and will say which is which.

The Difficult Category

Retablos depicting the violence raise a question a buyer should think about before acquiring one. They were made as testimony by people who lived through the events, and many are held by institutions concerned with memory rather than by private collectors. Acquiring one is legitimate, and it is not the same as acquiring a festival scene. The right approach is to know what is depicted, to know who made it, and to be able to say why it is in your house. That is a higher standard than most objects require and it is the appropriate one here.

The Case Is Half the Object

The exterior is easy to overlook and is a reliable index of care. The doors are painted with floral panels in a limited palette, and on good work the drawing is crisp, the fields are evenly laid and the two doors correspond when closed. Cheap work shows thin paint, wandering outlines and doors that do not match. Check the hinges and the catch as well, because a retablo is a functioning box and one that no longer closes properly has usually been repaired or was made without much thought about being handled.

Ateliers, Villages and Artisan Encounters

Ayacucho city is the centre and the workshops are findable and welcoming, with a house museum devoted to López Antay maintained by his family. The town is also, and inseparably, a place of memory: the conflict's history is present in its institutions and in a great many families. A visitor interested in the craft who ignores that half of the context has not understood what they are looking at.

Tourwit Editions and Provenance

Tourwit works directly with retablo families in Ayacucho rather than through intermediaries. Artisans are paid before the work begins and retain the major share of what a piece realizes. Editions are limited by what a hand can model at this scale, and each work is documented at source with its maker, their family line where one exists, and its subject stated plainly, so that the record travels with the object.

Why These Works Matter

This is a craft that has twice done something crafts are not supposed to do. It changed its own subject matter deliberately, through one named maker, within living memory. And when the region it belongs to was subjected to twenty years of political violence, it turned into a means of recording that violence for people who had no other way of doing so. A box of small painted figures is an unlikely medium for either, which is precisely the point.

The Sacred Year

Ayacucho's calendar has one occasion of national standing and one older cycle to which the retablo actually belongs, and they operate at very different scales.

Entering Festival Time

Holy Week at Ayacucho is among the largest in the Americas and fills the city for a week with processions moving between its many churches. It is the occasion the town is known for and the one that draws the country. For the crafts it is the commercial peak of the year, which carries the familiar consequence that the work available during it is not usually the work a serious buyer wants. Commission in the quiet months and collect at Easter if the timing suits.

The Older Cycle the Box Belonged To

The cajón de San Marcos was equipment for the herding year, specifically for the rituals around the marking of livestock, when animals are gathered, counted, marked and blessed. That is a summer occasion in the highlands and it is a household and community event rather than a public one. The box was opened, the figures arranged, and the ritual conducted in front of it. Nothing about the original object was decorative and nothing about it was for an audience.

Public Rituals and Private Worlds

Alongside these runs the ordinary highland year of patronal feasts and agricultural markers, and, since 2000, a calendar of commemoration: days on which the conflict's dead are remembered, and the ongoing work of identifying and returning remains to families. Ayacucho holds both kinds of observance, and they are not kept apart. The same families take part in both, and the same workshops make objects for both.

The Retablo in the Corral

The marking ritual is worth describing because it explains the object completely. Animals are gathered, the household assembles, the box is opened and set up, offerings are made and the animals are marked and counted with the figures present. The retablo is not illustrating the ceremony; it is part of the equipment for conducting it, in the way an altar cloth or a censer is elsewhere. Very few of the boxes now made will ever be used that way, and knowing what the original use was changes how the empty ones look. A retablo made for a wall is a picture of a piece of equipment rather than the equipment itself, and that is a legitimate thing to be as long as it is understood.

Culture in Motion

The city's musical tradition, particularly its guitar and its song, is strong and is one of the ways the conflict was processed publicly; testimonial song from rural Ayacucho is a documented body of work in the same way the retablos are. Craft, music and memory are not separate subjects here, and a workshop conversation will move between them without effort.

Etiquette and Presence

The conflict is recent, personal and unresolved for many people in this city. It should be approached with the assumption that anyone you are speaking to may have lost someone, and it should not be raised as a topic of curiosity. During Holy Week the processions are devotional and crowded. In workshops, unpainted figures are fragile and drying, and a table of them should not be leaned over.

Festivals as Lived Heritage

What the calendar explains is that this object was originally equipment for a specific rural ritual and is now, mostly, something else. That transformation was deliberate and it is documented, which is rare. A retablo on a wall in another country is several removes from a box opened in a corral at marking time, and the honest version of its story includes all of those removes rather than collapsing them into an appeal to antiquity.