Ann Daley, a major figure at the Denver Art Museum for decades, was a curator to her maternal core. She had an intense curiosity about the world, and she fostered that in her four children.

“She definitely instilled in us a sense for appreciating beauty in the world,” said her son, Colorado Public Radio health reporter John Daley. “Whenever we would travel, we would go into a museum and she would say, ‘Everyone go and pick out your favorite piece in the exhibit’ – and later, we would all take turns telling her why.”

Daley, the Denver Art Museum’s former Associate Curator of Western Art from 1997-2008, died Saturday after a recent cancer diagnosis. While she was 88, her death still caught her friends and family off-guard. At the time of her death, she was working out with a personal trainer and taking weekly Spanish classes.

“We thought she would last well into her 100s,” John Daley said.

Just last fall, Daley took a group cultural trip to Istanbul organized by the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art and the Art Students League of Denver. She was accompanied by Michael Smith, an attorney and arts enthusiast who called it one of his most fun adventures ever. “She and I were the only ones who wanted to go inside the Hagia Sophia,” Smith said of the famous mosque in Istanbul. “The lines were awful during the day, so we grabbed a taxi and we went on our own at 10:30 at night.”

Daley, said Christoph Heinrich, director of the Denver Art Museum, was just the loveliest kind of human being. “She was a wonderful friend to the museum with a wonderful sense of humor and always ready for a giggle,” he added.

Daley was well-known in the art world as a whip-smart curator – and for uplifting Colorado artists. One of her final offerings at the museum was also one of her most ambitious: “Landscapes of Colorado,” with more than 110 paintings and photographs by local artists.

Upon her retirement in 2008, legendary Westword arts reporter Michael Paglia wrote that Daley’s  most notable accomplishment was the installation of the Dietler Gallery of Western Art in the DAM’s Frederic C. Hamilton Building. At the time, that was arguably the most high-profile space in the building.

“For a curator to be involved with the installation of a new building was a dream come true,” Daley told Paglia in 2008. 

“Daley’s conception of the Dietler reveals her creativity,” Paglia wrote. “Most curators in her position imagine Western art to be limited to the (Charlie) Remingtons and (Fredrick) Russells, but for Daley the category also includes Christo’s work in Colorado, Robert Adams‘ narrative photos of tract houses, and even a Bruce Nauman DVD of the artist digging a post hole. And once she laid out her fairly radical program in the Dietler, her ideas made perfect sense. The layout was also a practical solution to the problem of the DAM’s Western collection being so bare-bones, with the newer works helping to cover the fact that there are so few historic ones.”

Heinrich said Daley elevated the Denver Art Museum’s national place with her embrace of Western American art at a time when “American art” was almost exclusively seen as “East Coast art.” “Now we have one of the four or five greatest collections of Western art in the world,” Henrich said, “and Ann was there in the earliest days of that.”

In 2005, former Denver Post Fine Arts Critic Kyle MacMillan wrote that the museum’s Petrie Institute of Western American Art, led largely by Daley, “has one of the strongest teams of any similar department in the country.”

Daley most recently worked as curator of the extensive collection of art owned by Jan and the late Fred Mayer.

But Daley’s legacy, Paglia wrote, was cemented by her association with several local collectors, including William Foxley, who once had his own Western art museum in the Navarre. One of her great achievements came in 1994, when she was hired to curate the Coors Western Art Exhibit at the National Western Stock Show, which she elevated into a highly respected annual affair.

“She fostered connections with a lot of artists in town,” Heinrich said. “She made a lot of local studio visits and she always brought local artists to the attention of our curators who might not necessarily have been from Colorado themselves. When I met her in 2007, for example, she would tell me whose work I might want to be interested in.”

Art from the start

Ann Scarlett was born Jan. 26, 1935, in Havre, Mont., the daughter of Frederick and Clara Scarlett. The family moved to Wyoming and Ann was soon named valedictorian at Rawlins High School, where she also was the first female to be elected student body president in 27 years. She graduated from Colorado Women’s College in 1955, the University of Wyoming in 1958, and she earned her master’s degree in arts history from the University of Denver in 1981. She married Jim Daley in 1957 and had had four children: Bruce, Scarlett, John and Matt. 

Daley began volunteering with the Denver Art Museum back in 1971 with her mother-in-law, who was a docent there, and she was hired as a staff curator there from 1977-80.

Before rejoining the DAM on a part-time basis in 1997, Daley was a Denver-based private curator, most notably heading the Mayers’ Captiva Collection. Before that, she helped organize the Aspen Art Museum’s “Mountains of the Mind” exhibition in 1993. 

Her many career achievements include being named to Metropolitan State University of Denver’s Center Visual Arts board of directors in 1991, and to the Denver Mayor’s Art, Culture & Film Committee in 1995. She is a former vice president of the Association of Professional Art Advisors. 

John Daley said his mother’s impeccable and innate sense for knowing what went best with what and where extended from museum walls to the stylish Daley family home. While Ann’s professional tastes necessarily focused on Western American art, her own jam, John said, was mixed-media wilderness artist Karen Kitchel, along with Don Stinson, Joellyn Duesburry, Karen Vance, Willie Matthews and more.

Daley, who married Jack Emerson in 1987 and became stepmother to his five children, will be remembered foremost, he believes, as someone steadfast and true, with an incredible talent for making and keeping friends over her entire lifetime. A person with a refined sense of aesthetics and an innate instinct for knowing the right place for just about everything.

“She just had a passion for art that was profound and deep and lasted her whole life,” John Daley said. One that now lives on in a large extended family that includes her four children, five stepchildren, five grandchildren, nine step-grandchildren and their spouses. “She was really the greatest mom ever, and the most gracious person you could ever meet.”

A celebration of Ann Daley’s life will be held from 3-5 p.m. on Monday, June 19, at the Denver At Museum. Please email your intention to attend to rsvp@redhouse.net. A streaming option will be available. 

The family requests that donations be sent to the Petrie Institute of Western American Art at the Denver Art Museum or the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art.