Curating.info

Vanderlip has brought more than 7,000 works to Denver on an acquisitions budget of exactly zero. It's something nobody mentioned when she was hired.

"I was in Philadelphia and Denver kept calling and calling," she recalled. She'd never been to the city, but her husband, an architect, had a meeting in Fargo, N.D., and, thinking it was nearby, she decided to fly here to check out the job.

"I got out of the taxi and I saw that building," she said of the daring Geo Ponti-designed art museum, "and I thought to myself, 'Anybody that had the chutzpah to put up a building like that, well, I wanted to build a contemporary art collection for that city."'

Only after she took the job did she think to ask about the acquisitions budget. "You have to raise it," they said.