NEW YORK—For nearly 35 years, New York–based Independent Curators International (iCI) has been quietly spreading the gospel of contemporary art by organizing and touring exhibitions to museums throughout the U.S. and abroad. These shows have innovative, often offbeat themes. One in development is “The People’s Biennial,” where the guest curators — artist Harrell Fletcher and Jens Hoffman, director of the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco — will organize a kind of roving art festival, choosing participating artists from the various communities where the show will take place.

ICI is run out of a modest office in a nondescript building in lower Manhattan. Last week, Kate Fowle, 38, became executive director, taking over from Judith Olch Richards, who’d held the position for 12 years. Fowle most recently served as international curator at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing. In 2002 she co-founded the M.A. program in curatorial practice at San Francisco’s California College of the Arts, and, before that, she co-founded smith + fowle, an independent curatorial partnership in London. ARTINFO spoke with Fowle in late May, a few days after she accepted her new post, about the importance of dialogue in the art world, what independent curating means today, and how a nonprofit like iCI can survive in tough times.

ICI was founded back in 1975 by Nina Sundell along with Susan Sollins, who went on, more recently, to establish the acclaimed public TV show Art:21. What was the original impetus behind iCI?

Nina and Susan were two resourceful women who chose to focus on what was missing in the art world at the time. They were aware that it was very difficult to see quality artworks in places outside of the main centers in the U.S. and developed exhibitions, organized by themselves or other curators, that would tour the country.

It seems as if iCI is not so well known in the art world.

It’s known and well respected by many who work in or frequent museums, but not so much in the commercial world. ICI is one of the few national organizations that try to bridge the relationship between what artists and curators are interested in and what the format of an exhibition can be.

In the early 1990s, you and your collaborator Deborah Smith started smith + fowle in the U.K., which was an iCI-like organization.

It was not quite the same but arose out of a similar impetus to fill a need we saw in the art world. We started before the boom of commercial galleries in London, so most of the artists we knew weren't at all supported by the market. We were interested in setting up an organization that would develop projects that responded to artists’ interests, predominantly through commissioning new work. At the time, this was one of the ways you could get funding into younger artists’ pockets and ensure they could be supported in the development of new ideas. The first thing smith + fowle curated was an exhibition called "You Don't Know Me, But." This toured to three different venues, but the works changed according to the specifics of each location.

And after that?

For five or six years, we worked out of an office in the East End, collaborating with organizations across the country, from local councils and nonprofits to museums and university research centers. One of the largest projects we did was a series of commissions, interventions, and events running up to the opening of the New Art Gallery Walsall, which was the largest newly built public art gallery to be developed in the country. Fiona Banner did her first public art piece for that — a 30-foot neon sign that said "Be there Saturday Sweetheart" — which was placed on top of the tallest building in the city center. Ultimately, all our projects were very much in the spirit of “try anything once.”

And now you are bringing that can-do spirit to your new post, as executive director of iCI. It must be daunting to step into Judith Olch Richards's shoes. She's been there for more than a quarter-century.