A committee has narrowed the list to six artists, and two will win $25,000 each. The nominees are...

Leo Berk, who creates works relating to real, depicted, or imagined space using diverse materials and contemporary industrial processes.

Margie Livingston, who explores paint as a sculptural medium, creating works that straddle two media—painting and sculpture.

Lead Pencil Studio (Annie Han and Daniel Mihalyo), a team that works beyond the traditional boundaries of sculpture and architecture.

Maggie Orth, an artist and technologist who designs and invents interactive textiles.

Hugo Solis, whose work focuses on the creation of interactive and multimedia sound installations.

Akio Takamori, a ceramic artist who creates evocative figurative sculptures drawn from memory and his life experiences.

It's a good list of solid artists, but we're talking about innovation here—this new award is called the Arts Innovator Award. For that, I'd have preferred to see much more fearlessness. In that category, Lead Pencil Studio gets closest, and maybe Hugo Solis—although both Orth and Solis, it seems to me, have not yet mastered the trick of making their technological innovations serve a larger project of artistic innovation. Or maybe there's something these artists are working on that I don't know about yet.

The money generously comes from the Dale and Leslie Chihuly Foundation. Two winners will be announced on October 7.

UPDATE: One thing I forgot to mention is that the application process was open to artists of all disciplines, but only visual artists advanced to the final six. At first I thought that was a score for visual art in Seattle, but now I am not so sure, since I am not convinced these are even the city's most innovative visual artists. The mystery of committees, right? Still, it's a great award and these are all strong artists, if not terribly boundary-stretching.