Congratulations, Rock.

Since 2001, when Rock Hushka joined the Tacoma Art Museum, he has been a champion of contemporary and regional art, having stewarded some 900 works of art into the collection, including the museum’s first video pieces, of which TAM now holds 16.

I’ve also enjoyed the ballsiness that lurks behind his bottled-up-businessman’s appearance. His shows have been some of the most daring, socially progressive, and intellectually expansive on the museum’s schedule.

Every time I heard about a TAM patron being annoyed or jangled, it seemed like Hushka was the cause—in a good way. I remember the ashamed hush of the audience while he talked about ACT UP during the weekly series of lectures on political art that accompanied his small but crackling show, The New York School: The Politics of Abstraction. A visitor to his Lewis & Clark Territory: Contemporary Artists Revisit Place, Race, and Memory was so mortified at a photographer’s series of idyllic forests where murders had taken place, she demanded it be taken down. Of course, it wasn’t. But the art had clearly moved her.

Not all his experiments have been successful, but they’ve all been worth doing. He turned the museum’s largest gallery into a carving studio for an entire summer for the young Puyallup artist Shaun Peterson, and the result was to have been a large figure that would stand outdoors across from the museum in perpetuity. But the log was wrong, and a replacement couldn’t be found until late, and, well, who knows where that project is now. At least Peterson convinced a few people that Indians still exist, and still make art. He told me he had challenging conversations with visitors almost every day about tradition and progress.

For months after former chief curator Patricia McDonnell left, I kept hearing that TAM wouldn’t hire another chief, that Hushka would be in charge of curatorial administration, that he would be first among equals, or something like that. Sounded like hooey to me. According to the press release, Hushka will “take on the responsibilities of senior curator at the museum, and will retain his former title of Curator of Contemporary and Northwest Art.” That just sounds like a way of folding two jobs together, and I hate to see curatorial jobs dwindle. But maybe this is TAM’s way of saying it only needs one curator, and we’ll see what comes of it.

What’s unfortunate is that Hushka’s promotion comes at a time when the museum is doing some of the least interesting shows I’ve seen there. The art of Eric Carle, the children’s book illustrator? Symphonic Poem: Aminah Brenda Robinson? Yuck. In both cases, the museum looks like it is pandering to a demographic rather than exploring fresh questions about art and life.

I’d like to see an expansion instead of the TAM model that goes all the way back to 1990s chief curator Barbara Johns—the one where a sense of strict discrimination is pleasantly shot through with slyness.