This Saturday is a good time to see the Monterey Museum of Art's more engaging persona.

I don't know if you've noticed, but there have been some recent and dramatic changes, on the walls and in the philosophy, at the Monterey Museum of Art.

First is Karen Crews Hendon, who came on as Lead Curator of Exhibitions in November 2011, is no longer with the museum as of this month.

She brought in graffiti/street artist Andrew Schoultz who painted up and down (and outside) the walls of the La Mirada museum. She put together—in collaboration with Amy Essick, Curator of the Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula collection—the contemporary painting show SHIFT: Fifty Years of Contemporary California Painting from the collections of the Monterey Museum of Art and the Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula.

The museum's executive director, Charlotte Eyerman, says that for the past year they've been "evaluating our curatorial and collections priorities, with a view to focusing on an intensive cataloguing and research effort."

In the meantime, they're inviting guest curators and scholars to fill the spaces. Lasting Impressions: Pedro de Lemos, coming April 30, is one of them.

"It will take time, in light of the museum's strategic objectives, to make a major curatorial appointment," Eyerman wrote in an email.

That's in regards to filling the job. But the change in curatorial direction is already evident. It's in the Youth Arts Collective's Alumni and Mentors exhibition at the Pacific location's Community Gallery, running through May 4. It's in the next show there: The Boys and Girls Club of Monterey County, May 22-Sept. 7.

And that change is most evident at La Mirada, where there is an experiment in progress, an experiment in participation, engagement and demystification. The main example of it is called Open Walls: You Are Here.

"We had some 'open space' on the exhibition calendar between Miniatures and Lasting Impressions: Pedro de Lemos, and it's very important to have an 'activated' museum," Eyerman writes. "We did not want an inert space on that scale (the Dart Gallery is our biggest space) for 3 months, which also isn't enough time for an exhibition, per se."

So she empowered Ami Davis, the museum's Director of Education and Community Partnerships who came on last July from managing the education department and k-12 school programs at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, to deputize other museum staff. Eyerman credits Davis with rejuvenating the museum's educational offerings for elementary students, revamping their Free Family Days, and and introducing other fresh programs like Spotlight Tours, artist workshops, Happy Hour panel discussions, lectures and more.

Davis and her ad hoc team came up with an interactive, creative and even playful interlude exhibition at La Mirada—more like a community-centric "un-exhibition."

There are painting stations and blank canvases, inviting visitors to paint and mount their own art. There is a flatscreen monitor that will show live tweets and photos taken in the museum. There is a mural made out of yarn. There is a living room—a real-life living room—in La Mirada's Dart Gallery, where you can just chill.

"I think there's a common misconception that art is to be appreciated passively," Davis says. "We see museums all over doing more interesting community engagement. The most singular example, locally, is the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. I followed [MAH executive director] Nina Simon for many years. This is something they're doing over there and something we think about as museum professionals. How do we keep museums relevant and dynamic?"

She's talking of Simon's "participatory museum" philosophy and book, an approach that turned MAH around from encroaching irrelevance and bankruptcy and made it into a cultural anchor of downtown Santa Cruz. Simon spoke on a panel last June at the Monterey Museum of Art-Pacific with Eyerman, gallery owner Chris Winfield and photographer Huntington Witherill about "This Business Called Art."

A good time to take in Open Walls (as well as new shows by Warren Chang and S.C. Yuan) comes on Saturday, Feb. 21. That's when Eyerman brings in Miki Garcia, Executive Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Santa Barbara, for an informal talk they call Director's Dialogue, 2-3pm ($10 for general admission), on "Museums in the 21st Century." This is part of what Open Walls is about.

Davis says that visitors to the two locations of the Monterey Museum of Art will have access to gallery guides to talk about the stuff on the walls. But here is a photographic preview, guided by Davis, of some of what Open Walls looks like.