Photo by Elena Dorfman

With the Chelsea skyline as her backdrop, Dennison stands in Flag's 10th-floor galleries. Beside her is Mark Bradford's "Ridin' Dirty," 2006, a work shown in a previous exhibition at the foundation.

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For a sneak preview of Flag Art Foundation's extensive exhibition of Ruscha-inspired works, click here.

It’s a balmy afternoon in mid-August, and Lisa Dennison is perched at the head of a conference table on the eighth floor of the gleaming Manhattan headquarters of Sotheby’s. Gazing out a window past an Alexander Calder stabile sculpture, she declares, “Yesterday was so exciting, every minute more interesting than the last. And at the end of the day, I said to myself, ‘Wow, I really love this job!’ ” A year ago, Dennison shocked the art world by quitting her job as director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum to take an executive position at the auction house, and however much her statement above smacks of a commercial for the firm, it sounds entirely genuine.

Still, Dennison’s first year at Sotheby’s hasn’t been without growing pains. The first time she witnessed a valuable consignment go to archrival Christie’s, she says, “I thought the world had just come to an end.” And her debut taking bids over the telephone was, to say the least, unnerving. “Some people are so calm on the phone, but I’m …” she shivers, unable to finish her thought. A few months into the job, though, Dennison’s title changed from the provisional “executive vice president” to the more fitting “chairman,” of North and South America, and she moved from her temporary cubicle into a spacious office overlooking York Avenue. Since then it’s been relatively smooth sailing, and she’s managed to complete the auction house trifecta—bringing in an important consignment, auctioning off a major work and selling a piece privately.

She’s making waves yet again, by returning to her curatorial roots, with the exhibition “Wall Rockets,” which opens on October 3 and runs through January, at the 7,600-square-foot private contemporary-art space run by the Flag Art Foundation in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood. The show is a multi-artist ode to the Ed Ruscha painting of the same name, which belongs to Glenn Fuhrman, Flag’s founder and a managing partner of the computer billionaire Michael Dell’s investment firm, MSD Capital. Fuhrman, who is currently the chairman of the American acquisitions committee of the Tate Museum in London and a vice chairman of the contemporary-arts council at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, has known Dennison for 15 years. She was instrumental in getting Amy Phelan, a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader turned art collector who is married to Fuhrman’s business partner John, onto the Guggenheim’s board. Fuhrman initially asked Dennison to write a catalogue essay for “Wall Rockets,” which he’d already begun planning, while she was still with the Guggenheim. Dennison has long been a champion of Ruscha’s work, having acquired the Guggenheim’s first Ruscha from the London dealer Anthony d’Offay in 2002 and backed the choice of the artist as U.S. representative at the 2005 Venice Biennale, where the Guggenheim owns and maintains the U.S. pavilion. But she turned Fuhrman down, feeling it would be a conflict of interest. “You couldn’t have the chief curator of the Guggenheim Foundation writing an essay for a private foundation,” she says, adding that later, when she became director of the museum, “it seemed even less appropriate.”

Fortunately, Fuhrman was persistent. He approached Dennison again last fall, just after she joined Sotheby’s, to gauge her interest in curating the exhibition. He wasn’t offering her a blank slate, though. “He said, ‘This is how the show is developing, and would you like to take over and continue to shape it,’ ” Dennison recalls. She was hesitant—“I had to think about how it related to my current job,” she explains—until she saw some of the art Fuhrman had in mind. Once she “realized that something in the universe of Ed’s creations—his imagery, his use of language— could be linked to a whole sphere of artists,” she promptly got the blessing of both Sotheby’s president Bill Ruprecht and the house’s chief auctioneer and international head of contemporary art, Tobias Meyer.