It happened sometime after entering graduate school in art history at The University of Michigan, while I was following a course of study to apply this discipline to museum work. It actually happened during an internship that took me off campus, and brought me into artists' studios and in touch with the population that lived in the greater Midwest region. I was assigned to organize a show of work by artists from five states to tour around the area. What happened has been played out time and again: artists hopeful of being selected. The stakes weren't so high: the exhibition would comprise one of six cars of the Michigan Artrain as it traveled to small towns and rural communities. These artists, like so many others, were desirous, too, of moving to New York - a place that presented itself as the necessary next career step in 'finding an audience for one's work.' But what also happened was a display of genuine interest to local citizens, and their experiences, to me, seemed to be of value - equal value - to those of the art-world audience. So what happened in my path of pursuing a museum career was empirical evidence of the public power of art - a lesson that lead me to a deep reflection and questioning of artmaking, art works, the art experience, and their relation to place.

I went on to work in museums for the next fifteen years (The Detroit Institute of Arts, then Chief Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and MoCA, LA). In those circles, the popular experience of art on the Artrain was deemed of such a low order as to be 'other.' It was a distinction that, I came to learn, had parallels to the one made in museums between curatorial work with art objects, considered to be of a higher order, and that of education departments with the public. I've worked with many artists and other professionals who believe that the 'true' contemporary art audience is those persons with knowledge of art, cognoscenti. I have known many such audiences, but have never been convinced that their engagement of art was categorically better than that of others, or that their experiences mattered more.

I took up the subject of audiences when I left museums - I might even say I was driven to be a curator elsewhere because I found museums more preoccupied with their needs (for identity, funds, visibility, control) than with addressing the experience of audiences. Outside the museum institution, I found myself in the terrain of 'public art.' Yet even there, art was more about public spaces and less about the public.

The art world is open to the new: new artists - younger ones or from 'new' cities and countries ; art that employs new media or is made in ways not seen before; art in venues new on the art map. The image of the curator in the second half of the 20th century is based in the search-for the-new. But, I think of the curator as someone in search-of-meanings, not just personal ones, but meanings that, through the conduit of the exhibition, can be communicated as a public experience. Here innovation - the new - occurs in the framing of art and in extending forms of presentation that, at times, turn the exhibition form on its ear in order to bring about new perceptions, to convey something significant, meaningful. And while the art world has for more than a century embraced the new, it has not been open enough, in my opinion, to the possibility of new audiences for art. I believe these audiences exist in the public realm, in ostensibly unlikely places; their backgrounds are not in art studies, but in various walks of life and the way they live life informs their experience of art. To redefining the public is the cutting edge of our practice.

As a curator, finding myself working outside museums in 1990 and working in site-specific situations, I identified not only with other international shows around the world that used the city-as-gallery, but also with the genre of public art. Public Art seemed ripe for change: there was a need to expand its discourse from that of the public space of architecture and landscape to include the place of the public. It also seemed important to bring a more humanized approach to public art into greater dialogue with cultural theory whose rethinking of the hegemony, was most cast in generalized and distanced terms. This meant seeing how these ideas could take form in exhibitions, fluidly moving this practice, too. I first undertook this way of working with Places with a Past in Charleston, South Carolina 1991. Now over a decade later, we have evolved our practice from projects first undertaken by artists as a cultural critique rooted projects that are making an actual change in the culture itself.

Curating became, for me, a practice of posing questions. The process of creating an exhibition, which by this time also meant for me commissioning new works of art, became a means of clarifying questions, locating their relevance to a field and their resonance within life. In testing the edge of public art in 1993 with Culture in Action in Chicago, for instance, a group of artists and I took up the proposition of how to make public art as much about the public as about art.Process and product, rooted in specific communities, were equally important, with opportunities for public participation along the way. Unlike museum practice, this work led to a new ethical relationship as other questions arose: Who can speak for whom? Can one be the author of one's own representation? What are the responsibilities of the artist to the public? How can the public inform the art process? Since that time, curatorial practice has changed, at least for some... seen in exhibitions carried out in the many new capitals for contemporary art around the world, and in the use of 'community' as a key word in the vocabulary of international contemporary art: community as subject, co-author, participant, audience, and site.

Now I find myself curating pedagogy. I've dubbed it 'Public Practice.' It is intended for both artists and curators, and maybe others, like educators or architects. It takes a position on the location and audience for contemporary art and suggests a mode of working. I say, 'curating' here because this pedagogy does not purport to have a fixed set of subjects and facts. It will be an open, co-learning process of professionals and students (and professionals returning as students), investigating certain propositions around work in the public realm: from sculpture to sustainable ecologies to social systems. This realm encompasses places (geographic, cultural, and virtual) as well as constituencies (persons bound together by place, issues, interests, or other shared identities). Together they form a context of a natural, built, and social dimension. This learning process is a creative one, too, where the students as well as professors will, over time, define the field and contribute to its evolution. Because it is equally carried out in the classrooms of The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and in the world, it will require the production of actual projects with artists and the public negotiated in a socio-cultural-political-aesthetic terrain. Our emerging practice is a hybrid practice combining various professional fields in the arts and other disciplines, communities, constituencies, and citizens. It is a critical practice that raises questions, provoking thoughtful reflection, affecting perceptions, and developing routes for public action in everyday life. And public practice is an ethical practice that foregrounds questions of responsibility around the notions of public good and positive social change.

I find this open process essential to learning and to art. Recently, a colleague and I have invented a research consortium entitled Awake: Art, Buddhism, and The Dimensions of Consciousness. It is not an exhibition, but rather a convening for which we 'curated' a series of topics, speakers and artists' presentations, and group of fifty museum professionals who have come together quarterly over two years to think deeply about audiences. During this process, I have become familiar with the concept of 'the mind of don't know.' This is not a state of ignorance, not knowing, but of being open. It is not a place of nothingness but, in the Buddhist sense of 'emptiness,' a space of full potentiality. I have found that 'the mind of don't know' translates well to my own practice as a curator. Guided by a clear aim (a question), the curatorial process can be one of exploration. It is necessary to not fix on a fully defined form at the outset but to invest in a process and, during the process of a project becoming, to stay open, in a state of 'not knowing.' Then other ways of thinking and making can arise. Trusting in a curatorial process, I seek to find the right form for an exhibition, one which is consistent with the intent of the art and can foster its meaning to the public.

'The mind of don't know' is the working space of artists, too. Critic Miwon Kwon recently critiqued the project-development process of Culture in Action as 'improvisational' with 'divergent approaches', as she sought to determine the rules of site-specific practice. I think here the historian's approach to taxonomy is misplaced. If as Kwon concludes 'the variations among these collaborative models reveal the extent to which the community remains a highly ambiguous and problematic concept in public art today,' then we might look to the positive potential of ambiguity to hold complexity - the condition of the public realm - rather than consider ambiguity a failing. The richness of artists' projects often comes from their ambiguity. Art is one of the few safe spaces for us to be in the realm of ambiguity. There we can think deeply about ideas embodied in questions even if they remain unresolved or are ultimately unanswerable. To work as a curator in concert with living artists is not to predetermine themes and meanings, but to create an open space of potentiality. To be sure, this path, is not always clear and rarely linear. But this open space allows for change in the process, flexibility, fluidity and, so, creativity. Establishing a generative dialogue in this space between artist and curator, the making of art and of an exhibition can have a reciprocal relationship, and the resulting works of art and final form of the exhibition become intrinsically bound. We might say that up until now we have lacked a curatorial model for the development of exhibitions that can parallel the artist's creative process. Perhaps an open and creative model can be found in 'the mind of don't know.'