For more than 20 years, Linda Moore ran a well-reviewed San Diego art gallery that showcased the works of contemporary artists from Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil and Chile, as well as Spain and California.
Today, the 76-year-old Mission Hills resident is a novelist, who has written two books about American women who are historians or dealers in Spanish and Latin American art. Her latest thriller, “Five Days in Bogotá,” will have a book release party on Wednesday evening in La Jolla. Former Union-Tribune art critic Robert Pincus will interview Moore about her work and there will be Colombian food and music.
In “Five Days in Bogotá,” art gallery owner Ally Blake travels to Bogotá to exhibit her clients’ work at an art fair in the 1990s. But after she arrives, she’s unwittingly pulled into a money-laundering and art fraud scheme and has to figure out how to protect her family and save her gallery.
“Five Days” is Moore’s second novel. Her first, “Attribution,” was published in 2022 and won numerous awards, including the Somerset Award in Literary and Contemporary Fiction and was a 2022 International Book Awards Finalist in Best New Fiction.
Moore recently spoke about her passion for art and her writing. This interview has been edited for length.
Q: What led you to launch your writing career in your 70s?
A: I love stories. I love listening to stories around the dining table, our metaphorical campfire, and I love sharing stories from my experiences. Artworks tell stories, too, even art that focuses on color and form and tries so hard to distance itself from narrative content, tells a story. I yearn for more original stories and decided to write stories I’d enjoy reading on issues I didn’t understand and in settings I wanted to explore.
Legacies for Latin American and Spanish art belong to the realm of the scholars. My goal was to spread awareness of these interesting cultures, their people and their histories. I started as a scholar and realized art and literature offered an effortless pathway to learning and understanding. I kept a map of South America in the gallery because collectors and staff didn’t know where Uruguay and many other places were. When a reader mentions they enjoyed the story and they learned something from my books, it’s the highest praise. I also learn things as I research and write and that motivates me to keep at it.
Q: The heroines of your novels, art historian Cate Adamson in “Attribution” and gallery owner Ally Blake in “Five Days in Bogotá,” share your interests and expertise. How much of yourself and your experiences did you invest in these characters?
A: John Irving talks about ‘autobiographical shreds like crumbs on a counter’ that readers like to gobble up. Those shreds tend to become the focus for some readers, diminishing what is imagined and converting fiction into reality. When “Attribution” came out, I was often asked if Cate was me. I’d laugh and answer, “I’ve never stolen a painting.” With the new book, I tried to deflect some questions with a lengthy Author’s Note. Those behind the story comments were meant to reassure readers most of the story and the characters are imagined. That said, a scene like the one with García Márquez are written very close to what happened when I met him in Bogotá. Every author draws on her own experiences and people she has known for imagined composites of events and characters. Neither Cate nor Ally is me; both are smarter, better-looking, and more physically fit than I am. I don’t drink Campari much anymore, but I do consume lots of coffee.
Q: Did you travel to Colombia when you were writing and researching this novel?
A: While I was writing, I traveled to Colombia several times to coastal cities like Cartagena, a historic place straight out of “Love in the Time of Cholera.” I have not been to Bogotá for years. La Candeleria, founded in 1538, is the protected historic area of the city that is depicted in two chapters in “Five Days in Bogotá” and it hasn’t changed. The novel is (about) the Bogotá of the 1990s, when I was there, when there were no personal computers or cell phones. Ally had to find a landline to call her children or send a fax instead of emails and texts. It’s difficult to write scenes without those devices.
Q: What do you hope your readers will discover about the world of Latin American art and the artists themselves when they read this book?
A: Geographic labels like “Latin American” are useful only as a reference to where an artist was born or lives, but not a style of art. Artists in Latin America are like artists from China to South Africa. They struggle to discover their soul, to create their unique voice, improve and refine it, to connect with an audience and to develop a dialogue with the artistic community.
Four hundred years ago, it meant something to talk about Italian art and how it might differ from Spanish art, because artists and everyone else were more isolated. During the 1600s Baroque Period, Velázquez traveled to Italy twice and was influenced by the art he saw. Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens spent eight months in Madrid and had planned to travel to Italy with Velázquez to continue his study of Titian. The Habsburg/Spanish Empire included the Iberian Peninsula, Milan, Naples, Sicily, Flanders, places in Asia and Africa as well as both North and South America.
Twentieth century artists like Picasso and Braque drew inspiration from African art. Monet loved Japanese art. Latin American artists traveled to Europe to study as there were few art academies in South America. Uruguayan artist Torres Garcia returned from Europe to Montevideo and started an art workshop in 1934. The artists who trained there formed an art movement called La Escuela del Sur.
As Ally navigates the art fair, she encounters dealers exhibiting art from many places including New York, Panama, Argentina and Japan. Art fairs reflect the globalization and cultural integration that has consistently increased over the centuries.
Q: Tell me about your background in art.
A: My Swedish grandmother took up painting in her 60s and sparked an interest in me as a child. She didn’t have a television and so we all painted. We weren’t allowed to have coloring books, only blank sheets of paper. When I traveled as an exchange student to Mexico City at age 15 and as a college student to study at Complutense University of Madrid, my eyes were opened to extraordinary art. I took many courses in art history, but never studied art.
After I was married, someone broke into our house and stole jewelry. The insurance covered a small amount, which I used to buy serious art. Art was harder to steal, more difficult to conceal, and for an ordinary thief, impossible to sell. Suddenly, I was a collector. From there, it’s a small step to selling or trading a work you own to acquire something you prefer, and voilá, you’re an art dealer!
Q: Where did your interest begin in Latin American/Spanish art?
A: My interest in Latin America began when I was an exchange student to Mexico City and for the first time, other students questioned me about the policies of my own country. The great murals of Rivera, Siqueiros and Orozco are political statements, and the emotionally intense works of Frida Kahlo connected me to themes of female authenticity. The link between art and the political world intrigued me. I was on a track to be a journalist and landed in cross-border health care, but I continued to search out art wherever I traveled.
Q: Can you tell me a little history about the Linda Moore Gallery and your work with the San Diego Museum of Art? And when did you retire?
A: I began as an art dealer in 1987 while I worked as a health care administrator. Initially, I represented artists from the U.S., France, and Japan and when things were going well, I left health care to open a gallery and have more control over my time.
San Diego friends Stephanie and (her husband) U.S. Ambassador to Argentina Ted Gildred invited me to visit them in Buenos Aires. Ted knew I had studied Latin American politics at Stanford and had strong connections to the region. Stephanie and the U.S.’s cultural attaché introduced me to Argentinian and Uruguayan artists.
I came home with dozens of artist portfolios to study. I returned to Montevideo and Buenos Aires the next year and began a serious artist selection process visiting studios and interviewing artists for exhibitions in San Diego. We were fortunate to get reviews in national and international art journals as well as the San Diego Union Tribune and the Los Angeles Times. We did art fairs in Los Angeles, Chicago, Seattle, Madrid, Buenos Aires, and Bogotá.
After 20 years, I pulled away from being an art dealer, deciding I wanted to pursue my own creative projects through writing. I applied to Stanford’s novel-writing program and spent two years learning to write fiction.
I had been the chair and a member of the San Diego Museum of Art’s Latin American Arts Committee (and) when I no longer had a conflict as an art dealer, the Board and Museum Director at that time, Derrick Cartwright, invited me to become a trustee. I served six years in two terms. We rented the museum for the book launch of “Attribution.” I haven’t retired. An art lover never retires.
Q: Do you have ideas for future novels?
A: While at Stanford, I completed a novel called “The Baobab Tree,” set in the Kivu Region of the Democratic Republic of Congo, ground zero for violence around conflict minerals. The story has three narrators including a woman fugitive hiding from her past. The art in that story is the art of survival. Another story keeps nagging me: two friends raised their daughters together, but no longer speak because of their opposing political views.
Josh Mohr, a great writer and friend, taught me to write what I don’t understand. I don’t understand a world without nuance where everyone is so certain of their viewpoint and pays a mighty price in troubled relationships. Maybe that book is set in Kauai.
Q: Where in San Diego do you live and what’s your writing process (sounds like you write when you’re in Kauai?)
A: I live in Mission Hills in a 100-year-old house where we found paintings hidden in a potting shed! After a 20-hour flight, I am 10 minutes from my bed. I am also 10 minutes from Balboa Park with the Old Globe, the many museums and wonderful cultural activities. I have traveled the world and am constantly reminded there is no better place than San Diego.
Kauai would be a wonderful writing retreat if we could discipline ourselves to not invite guests. It’s just so incredibly beautiful that we love to share it with others.
Mostly, I write in my corner desk in San Diego, peeking at the Pacific Ocean across Presidio Park where Spanish explorer Portola arrived over 250 years ago. With that history, my imagination jumps to distant times and places.
Book cover for Linda Moore’s novel “Five Days in Bogota.”
(Courtesy of She Writes Press)
“Five Days in Bogota” by Linda Moore (She Writes Press, 2024; 304 pages)
Warwick’s presents Linda Moore book launch
When: 5 p.m. Wednesday
Where: Private location in La Jolla
Tickets: $18.95, includes signed book and Colombian food and music
Register: warwicks.com/event/moore-2024