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For Yasmil Raymond, a simple lesson in benevolence became her first lesson in art curation.

Raymond, who served as a curatorial fellow and later an associate curator at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis from 2004 until last month, was accompanying the Walker’s visual arts curator, Siri Engberg, to a meeting with artist Kiki Smith in New York. "Back then, I was kind of like that boy on the sidelines of a tennis match," she says. "Just watching and throwing back the balls."

On the way to Smith’s apartment they stopped, at Engberg’s suggestion, to pick up flowers and something sweet. "I was sort of thrown out of myself at first," Raymond says. "Here we were bringing these 3-D models to lay out the exhibition with Kiki. And the priority for the curator was to use a very domestic gesture of hospitality — that it was about being human. And I suddenly realized: this was not about business. This is about how we convey ourselves in the world."

It’s the insight she gleaned on that 2004 trip, right after graduating with her MFA in curatorial studies from Bard College, that will inform her curatorial impulse at Dia Art Foundation. She’s taken over the post from Lynne Cooke, who had served there since 1991.

Raymond says her priority is the artists and their work — to calibrate and respect how they would want their works shown, as she did with Tomás Saraceno’s "Lighter Than Air" exhibition at the Walker. In that sense, it is only the artist’s voice — and not the prospective audience’s — that guides her. "I approach it as if I am approaching an unfamiliar, the other," Raymond says. "There is nothing more alarming to ask a person who is not like you, 'Who are you?' I hate to give that treatment to works of art, to say, 'Who are you?'"

To that end, she says, museums have a responsibility to visitors: not necessarily to educate but to inspire. "Not every person that comes to Dia or the Walker should have the same experience," Raymond says. "To think that there’s one answer for every beholder, I think that’s where we go back to the problem of this imaginary visitor. Sometimes providing less information is actually more valuable."

Raymond is contemplative and deliberate. Like the contemporary artwork she reveres, she is careful not to quickly reveal or categorize herself. She often stops in midsentence, searching for the perfect word, as when discussing Dia’s unique approach to curating. It is "unconventional ... no, quirky ... no, that is not right. Ambitious. It is so ambitious," she says. But when she is passionate about something, she becomes animated, her hands waving like a conductor’s. She believes one should curate or write about only those works of art one has seen in the flesh, as it were, because the colors and scale — and the power — of the pieces can never be reproduced in a photograph. "I remember opening crates of Warhol paintings," she says. "The paintings were electric. So out of another period, another palette, another moment in time. It was like Christmas in the gallery that day."

At Dia, Raymond will reunite with Philippe Vergne, who left his post as deputy director at the Walker in 2008 to become Dia’s director. In 2007, Vergne and Raymond collaborated on one of the Walker’s most critically acclaimed exhibitions to date, Kara Walker’s "My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love," the first US survey of Walker’s work. Raymond says there are few places that have as much respect for the artist and visitor as the Walker and Dia, the latter of which has been unconventional not only in creating an impressive permanent collection of innovative contemporary works, but also in committing itself to the belief that artists are visionaries whose works speak their own language.

"To me, thinking of the institution as a home, where you are welcoming people, where people will feel respected, there will be a return relationship and a return visit," Raymond says. "To me, it is about creating an experience of hospitality. Would you ever tell a visitor in your home what to feel? It is about their own discovery."