“The Land of Beautiful Flowers and Birds: The Journey of Frederic Edwin Church through New Granada” with Dr. Verónica Uribe

December 9, 2021

Frederic Edwin Church arrived in New Granada on April 28th,1853 seeking inspiration from the tropical landscape that was previously recorded by Alexander von Humboldt in Cosmos (1845). This talk will follow the trail left by Church while crossing the territory of current-day Colombia, characterized by his fascination with what he encountered and the great discomforts of navigating the complex geography and culture. Food, birds, plants, people, and astonishing views were part of his adventure and recorded through sketches, letters, and a bilingual diary. In this virtual program, Professor Verónica Uribe will discuss how Church fed his visual memory and brought these memories to life through his well-known paintings of the tropics.

Verónica Uribe has a BFA (2000), and an MFA (2001) from the Australian National University and a PhD in Humanities from the Universidad Pompeu Fabra of Barcelona (2009). She is Associate Professor in Art History at the Universidad de Los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia and currently chairs the Art History Department in the same University (2017-present). She recently won a Terra Foundation for American Art Academic Grant (2019) and has recently been invited as a Getty Research Institute Scholar (2022). She has published three books in Spanish on sketchbooks, traveling painters, and representations of bridges in nineteenth-century Colombia.