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.

It's incredible to talk with her. Her accumulated knowledge is immense. She knows the square footage of most museums and galleries in the U.S.

How are you planning to shake things up?

I'm keen to look at what a touring exhibition could be right now, and what the notion of independent curating internationally means today. It’s about independent thinking rather than the “institutional” versus “freelance” dichotomy, and touring may not always need to be moving objects and artworks from place to place. The movement of people and ideas is also important to think about.

So iCI would be an organization that would not only tour artworks but also, in a way, tour artists and curators — creative workers?

Yes. Dialogue, and the exchange of ideas, is incredibly vital in starting to develop networks nationally and internationally. With the increasing professionalization of the field, it’s about sharing resources and finding new ways of working that open up opportunities for artists and curators to connect with a wide range of audiences. I'm interested in thinking about touring as embracing the concept of a network, expanding the ways in which all facets of the art world, including collectors, commercial galleries, museums, nonprofits, and other people interested in the arts, can find out about and engage with what's happening all over the world. ICI could be a kind of hub.

ICI as a way of harnessing energy — less focused on conventional ideas about exhibitions.

Yes. That plays into what I've been thinking about for the last eight years or so, having co-founded the curatorial master’s program at California College of the Arts, which is: What constitutes curating an exhibition?

What shows would you point to as particularly exemplary of what iCI should be doing?

"High Times Hard Times," the New York painting show curated by Katy Siegel that toured two years ago, is a great example of a more historic show that profiled works that were being overlooked.

That show seemed to fit the ongoing curatorial interest in looking back and filling in historical blanks.

Yes, and I think another that did that was the "Jess: To and From the Printed Page" exhibition curated by Ingrid Schaffner. There is a lot of potential for iCI to do more solo shows. There have been very few, and they are of deceased artists.

Why?

ICI didn't want to prioritize one living artist over another. But in the current climate it's possible to reexamine that, potentially even working on a “project room” model with emerging artists rather than with large-scale exhibitions.

What challenges does a nonprofit like iCI face during the recession?

With many strong supporters of the arts, including foundations, feeling the impact of the recent crash, it’s not going to be easy in the coming year. This financial retraction isn’t just affecting museums and nonprofits but commercial galleries, too. That's just another instance of how interrelated the art world is now and why we need to think about new models of working together. There's a lot of scaling back, and the positive aspect of that is it enables people to rethink the key focus of their organization.

But how do you scale back?

Ultimately, you have to look at the way artists are working and what they need, while also looking at what your audience is interested in and what they need. There's less room now for getting those things wrong. Even if organizations end up downsizing, ideas don't have to get downsized. It's just about figuring out how to do them.

Sarah Douglas is Senior Correspondent for ARTINFO, Art+Auction, and Modern Painters.