Dianne Vanderlip gives more than lip service to art. The founding curator of Denver Art Museum’s modern and contemporary art collection, she has given much of her life to art. Not that she’s complaining.

Think you have difficulty deciding precisely where and how to hang the family photographs in your foyer?

Consider the task at hand for Dianne Vanderlip, the founding curator of modern and contemporary art at the Denver Art Museum. Prior to the much anticipated Oct. 7 grand opening of the expanded DAM campus, Vanderlip will have chosen roughly 100 art works from a permanent collection of about 8,000 pieces – all acquired by her since joining DAM in 1978. She will have ordered and installed these high-priced if not priceless works in bold new galleries in Denver’s latest iconic building, designed by world-renowned architect Daniel Libeskind.

Get the picture?
Fortunately, the vanguard Vanderlip not only is up to the task, she’s having, in her words “a ball” as her career culminates. The formidable Vanderlip’s emotional palette includes the full spectrum. She can switch from tranquil to testy in fewer than 60 seconds. As with many artists, her wardrobe consists mostly of black, though her favorite color is canary yellow. And if she herself were a color, Vanderlip claims she’d be red.

She was wearing, in fact, red shoes — French red shoes. Her job demands style, though she’s not above buying shoes at Target or clothes at secondhand shops.

“On my budget, I have to,” she says. “I’m not defined by my possessions, though I do fall into the trap of trappings. I am not one of those people who needs the big house or the fancy car or the Prada bag — though I have all those things. (Namely, a black BMW and a home in the Golden Triangle.) But I could sleep under a bridge pretty easily, too.”

In the month prior to this interview, Vanderlip had made business trips to Los Angeles, New York, Atlanta and Switzerland. Though especially enamored of the art scenes in Southern California and Berlin, she happily hangs her hat in the Mile High City.

Maybe it’s the light.
“Colorado has this silvery light that’s so crisp and clear. This light does something to people. You wake up in the morning and the light goes right through you,” she says.

“Just today I was walking down the street and looking around Denver, at all the changes, and I thought ‘I’m really lucky to be alive, to be here and to have such a fantastic life.’ It’s a good world. There’s a lot of bad stuff going on out there, but ita good world,” she says.

The art world’s eyes turn toward Denver as DAM prepares to open the doors of the titanium-clad Frederic C. Hamilton Building, where Vanderlip’s influence will fill the majority of the new gallery space. Furthermore, she will install the new sculpture deck, as well as two major outdoor sculptures on the plaza.

The logistics of such undertakings are staggering. Vanderlip and her staff have deliberated for years on the opening exhibitions. “There’s a catalog in my head,” says the curator. Yet creating exhibitions for the new galleries forced Vanderlip to transcribe her mental catalog. Using scale models of the art in the permanent collection, she and her staff arranged and rearranged “hundreds and hundreds” of Barbie doll-sized masterpieces on scaled gallery blueprints mounted on a wall in Vanderlip’s office. The inaugural exhibits followed a three-pronged rationale: showing heretofore unheralded works with esthetic and intellectual currency ordered so visitors can comfortably make their way through the new Libeskind building.

Many of the works from DAM’s permanent collection have never seen the silvery light of day in Denver. Many more, much to Vanderlip’s chagrin, remain archived.

“The hard part is what I won’t bring out. My heart is so broken over the pieces still in storage,” says the curator, “but the galleries are designed in a way that we can take out the mother well and put in another. Art will go in and out. Over the next five years, visitors will have the opportunity to see all the major works of art in the collection.”

Vanderlip ranks Denver right behind New York, Los Angeles and Chicago on the short list of American cities with enviable collections of modern and contemporary art. That status owes much to her vision. Active and acknowledged in her field, she has served on numerous boards and juries, including the National Endowment for the Arts, Getty Grant panels and the Berlin Art Forum. The City Council of Denver honored her with a special resolution for contributions to the arts in the city of Denver. Vanderlip currently is an adjunct professor in the University of Denver’s School of Art and Art History.

Vanderlip will retire from her full-time DAM position in January, but will stay on as curator emeritus, splitting her time between Denver and Santa Monica, where her family resides.

But the curator is quick to emphasize that she’s not so much the unassailable arbiter of taste in contemporary art as she is a scholar constantly studying. Vanderlip underscores that when presenting prospective artworks to trustees and DAM’s collection committee, she must consider much more than the parameters of her personal preferences.

“There’s a deep rationale for why we collect that has more to do with how a work fits into the society of art being made today or yesterday,” she says. “It has to be intellectually sustainable within the context of the greater art world.”

Vanderlip’s assured air sometimes serves as a varnish: Underneath this calm surface beats the heart of a bunny rabbit, she admits.

She recalls giving her first lecture: “I was so nervous, I had to give the whole lecture in a single breath. Then I stopped. I was the most insecure person on the planet. I’ve learned to relax a lot with it. I figure, what are they doing to do — take away my birthday?”

How many candles will light her cake this year remains unasked, but Vanderlip seems to have eased into another phase of aging gracefully when she recently forsook dark brunette hair coloring in favor of wearing a spiky ‘do in silver and gray. The more natural hair color softens Vanderlip’s appearance and allows her wide-open pale green eyes to take the starring role on her face, which is intense and interested and earnest.

Not that she lacks a sense of humor. Vanderlip’s one and only grandchild — the son of her only child, Sarah, an artist, who is married to an artist with the surname Dominic — is named Dominic Vanderlip: “Sounds like a Dutch pizza parlor,” says the grandmother, who beams at the mention of her progeny.

But she was all business when asked what she does with her precious little leisure time: “Nothing. My work is my life.”

In Vanderlip’s office in DAM’s administration building, haphazardly hung postcards and articles and computer printouts dangle from the walls. Her desk is cluttered. So is a conference table. Along with stacks of books and piles of papers, there’s a jar of popcorn and an air popper, a chair with a ratty rattan seat blocking one of the doors, a big round dog bed and a stainless steel water bowl for her year-old golden retriever, Ruby. (Her other roommate is a “slightly insane” tiger cat named Pearl. Vanderlip dubs her beloved late dog Champ “the love of my life.”)

Taped to the front of Vanderlip’s desk is a mock-up of a banner headline that reads ‘Guhhklhih!’— gobbledygook she inadvertently typed with her fingers on the wrong keys. Perhaps it’s apropos as the DAM opening nears. How does she manage the stress?

“I talk to my dog,” Vanderlip says, giving the well groomed and well mannered pooch a scratch beneath her silky chin. “Or I talk to my daughter.”

Or she talks to her cadre of friends. She enjoys dining out. (Her favorite restaurant is Sparrow.) She reads voraciously, typically five books at a time —both fiction and nonfiction. She’s a history buff, keen on China since Mao and also World War II: “I share a birthday with Hitler.”

Her sense of history comes into play when she criticizes the current lack of funding for arts in schools. “It’s dangerous to this culture to be cutting back on arts. Dangerous! What was the first thing the Taliban did? They blew up the Buddha. The Nazis got rid of the art. It’s dangerous that society doesn’t teach about art and embrace art for the culture because you can’t be a whole person without art,” she exclaims.

Naming her personal favorite artists, Vanderlip includes Rosa Bonheur, a 19th-century French Realist: “She had to dress up like a man to make her paintings,” says Vanderlip, who does not deem art created by women or men inherently different, but does testify that women in the art world still get the short end of the maulstick.

"Women are getting much more attention now than even 20 years ago, and in terms of acquisitions or people who run university art programs or are directors of major museums, there are more women,” she says, “but name me three women collectors. I don’t think you could. And collectors have the power because they have the money. The power is still with men.”

Vanderlip knew she wanted to enter the art arena as a girl growing up across the street from the Toledo Museum of Art. “The museum was open to children, and I could run across the street all by myself and go tearing through. Looking at bare naked ladies when I was 6 was a big deal, but you could also look at Egyptian things — mummies! — and you could look at glass and El Greco,” she recalls.

Raised by her father, Vanderlip and her older brother inherited from him a passion for reading and a wanderlust. “He made sure we saw the world. By age 10, I had been to all 48 states,” she says. “He was this extraordinary man by himself raising two kids — unheard of at that time.”

An art major in college and graduate school, she describes herself as “a terrible painter, but quite a competent draftsman. And I was always an A-plus student.” The still studious Vanderlip most emphatically does not make art now, nor does she intend to. Ever.

“There’s enough bad art in the world. And even bad art is hard to make,” she scoffs. “Art is as serious as the latest tank. It would not be therapeutic for me. My competition would be Van Gogh. After college, for my first job, I went to a gallery in New York. I looked at the art there, and I stopped painting, and I never did it again. I don’t even draw rabbits for Dominic.”

Even if she doesn’t make her own art, the curator has left her indelible mark on the Denver Art Museum. Vanderlip says, “There are three rules: The first is there are no rules. The second is there are no rules. The third is don’t hurt anybody. That sounds flippant, but you have to get outside your comfort zone in this world to live this life. We broke a lot of rules to get this museum.”