A Master Weaver and his work: Wilber Quispe Huaman (Part 2)

Quispe's Huari design rug with a border added (M Sigrah photo)

The Huari designs that Wilber Quispe Huaman weaves today have their origins in a culture that is over a thousand years old. Pre-dating the Incan city of Machu Picchu by over 500 years, the ancient capital of the Huari culture stood near Ayacucho, the artist’s present-day home in the Andes.

The Huari were believed to have developed terraced field agriculture in this hemisphere, which seems to be echoed in the stylized zig-zag design of Quispe’s rugs. Moreover, the Huari have produced some of the finest hand-woven textiles the world has ever seen. A few surviving examples can be seen at the Textile Museum in Washington D.C.

Another of Quispe’s rug designs has it origins in our time and tells another side of the legacy of the people in this region of the Andes. El Niño Perdido shows a lost boy taking refuge in a huge tree. It depicts a story from the artist’s own life on the run from the Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path), the Peruvian terrorist group that claimed Quispe’s remote Andean village, Paccha, as part of its stronghold throughout the 1980’s.

At the age of eight, circumstances forced Quispe to leave his family for several years. After losing both parents to illness, he went to earn money at hard labor to help support the family. While he was away, the terrorists were becoming established in the vicinity. At age twelve, Quispe was finally able to return home, only to find he was faced with three choices, all of them terrible: join the terrorists, be killed for refusing to join them or hit the road again.

He decided to leave his home for the second time, climbing trees at night to hide and covering himself with leaves to stay warm.

Luckily this time, he ended up in neighboring Ayacucho, where he was fortunate to be reunited with his sister and one of his brothers. Ayacucho continues to be the most important traditional weaving center of Peru, from the time of the Huari culture to the present day. There his brother taught him to weave and an older weaver also mentored him until he followed his brother to Lima in 1985, where he tried to earn a living in the weaving factories.

On December 11, 1989, the terrorists raided Paccha and massacred all the remaining men in Quispe’s village. His oldest brother’s family was among the lucky ones who managed to escape that night, but it was several years before the artist learned that they had been spared.

Wilber Quispe shows Salud a Puchamama, his favorite  (M Sigrah photo)

In 1992 the terrorists were finally ousted. But by then, the 21 year-old Quispe had borrowed money from his employer to build a house for his wife and young family in a shantytown near Lima. He was indebted and unable to leave. He was further discouraged as a weaver in the city, where the manufactured weaving materials were inferior to what he was able to produce using traditional methods, as he had been shown in the mountains.

But it was also during this time that the artist met Melanie Ebertz, owner of artAndes. Ebertz had traveled to Peru from Minneapolis in search of a skilled weaver for her textile business. Just before they met, Quispe had become so discouraged with his prospects for making a living as a weaver that he was about to abandon the craft to become a laborer. Through their partnership, he was able to save enough over the years to finally realize his dream of returning home to the mountains.

Not until 2000 was Quispe finally able to afford to return home for good. He had been in exile for seventeen of his thirty years.

By this time, the artist’s dream of starting a weaving workshop in Ayacucho became merged with the dream of his entire village to raise itself from the ashes.

The Paccha village “elders,” (in reality young people from among those orphaned in the1989 massacre), explained that with electricity and a secondary school, they could rebuild and help themselves, but the government had never come through with the help they had promised. The young villagers had to walk two hours each way to the closest school if they wanted to continue beyond the sixth grade.

Two years later, in 2002, through the goodwill of artAndes and friends, a foundation called Comunidad was formed to help. A secondary school was built, teachers hired and only two years later, in 2004, it graduated its first senior class. A community grain mill was donated after that. Plans for water, sanitation and basic health measures and a scholarship program are in store for the future.

Of all his rug designs, Quispe is especially fond of Salud a Puchamama (Salute to Mother Earth) which is his original design. It shows the artist’s upraised arms greeting the sunrise in his beloved mountains, bringing his creative gifts back full circle to where he started, paying respects to the source that gave him the power to create such beauty. It shows his deep gratitude for the gift of being home again.