On Writing Five Days in Bogotá

I was in New York City visiting galleries and studios in the early 1990s. A gallerist friend invited me to a dinner party in his apartment in The Old Police Building. Among the guests were Colombian dignitaries who had spoken at the United Nations that day. The cumbia music swept me away as my friend explained he was on a committee for a new art fair in Bogotá. He couldn’t convince American galleries to exhibit because of the cartel violence. He urged me to bring my artists’ works to Bogotá and I was intrigued.

Back in California, I pondered how I could exhibit at an expensive art fair in Colombia when I didn’t represent any artists from there. Focused on the economics of the fair, I projected how I could sell enough to justify the expense. I didn’t think about the danger!

If we were going to succeed, I needed to take bold steps. One gallery artists DeLoss McGraw had completed a series of works focused on Colombian Nobel winner Gabriel García Márquez and his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. I wrote the Cultural Attaché in the U.S. Embassy to introduce myself and asked her to invite García Márquez to the fair. Why not?  

I began to exhibit a couple of Colombian artists including Ana Mercedes Hoyos and invited Uruguayan artist Fernando Lopez Lage who had been recognized as a rising star, to join me in Bogotá. A plane ticket for Fernando bringing artworks in checked baggage was cheaper than shipping art. And he would help me install and sell at the fair.

We had the adventure of a lifetime and laughed remembering it. Fernando recalled when we were stopped and interrogated at a check point and that the limo driver’s name was Bruno. Many of the scenes in Five Days in Bogotá did happen, even though the main story is fiction. I do love when critics call the book ‘immersive.’ 

Five Days in Bogotá

“Love thrillers? Me, too, and Linda Moore’s whip smart Five Days in Bogotá adds extra ammunition to the genre, with a feisty art . . . heroine on the verge of bankruptcy who has to thwart art fraud, nefarious ex-boyfriend, and even drug lords, in order to keep her family safe. A hold-your-breath read about what we do for love―of family and of art.”
―Caroline Leavitt, New York Times best-selling author of Pictures of You and With or Without You

Gallery owner Ally Blake risks everything to exhibit at an art fair in Bogotá in the 1990s. She needs wealthy collectors to boost her gallery’s sales and save her family from bankruptcy. When her art crates are tampered with and she discovers an ex-boyfriend and colleague from her State Department days in Santiago has involved her in a money laundering scheme, she devises a strategy to thwart the fraud, protect her children, and secure her family’s future―but pulling it off will require her to make the art deal of a lifetime.

BUY HERE

Linda Moore is an author, traveler and a recovering gallery owner. She studied art history at the Prado while a student at Complutense University of Madrid and received degrees from the University of California and Stanford University. Her gallery featured contemporary Hispanic artists. She has published award-winning exhibition catalogs and her writing has appeared in art journals and anthologies. Born in the Midwest, she resides with her husband in California when not spending time traveling the world.

 

Tags: featured, women writers

Category: On Writing