Innovation time in the arts

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Sometime next year, a seeing-eye dog may guide visitors — even those with no vision impairment — through the galleries of the Hammer Museum in Westwood to a pre-selected painting. In San Francisco, young actors in training may be found rounding up an audience for a play staged in a bar. Visitors to a museum in Oakland may be asked to tell the curators how they’d like to interact with the art, while in downtown San Diego, they may bump into an artist completing a work in progress.

These are all projects that are being supported by the James Irvine Foundation’s latest round of Arts Innovation Fund grants, announced today, six- and seven-figure morsels of capital the foundation is doling out to what it deems to be the most innovative visual and performing arts organizations in the state.

Susan Emerling tells the back story of the grants in today’s Calendar.