Dont worry about Northwest African American Museum, says Barbara Earl Thomas, founding director. The show goes on, with people like the ones above featured in upcoming events.
The show goes on at the Northwest African American Museum, with people like the ones above featured in upcoming events. Courtesy of Northwest African American Museum

Seattle's Northwest African American Museum, the only one of its kind between Vancouver, B.C., and San Francisco, announced this morning that director Rosanna Sharpe has left after three years.

Board president Debbie Bird didn't say why Sharpe departed, only that her last day was September 20 (the same day Bird became board president, it turns out, and Mimi Gardner Gates assumed the vice-chair role), and that "This is very exciting times for the museum going forward. We thank Rosanna for her work."

The museum plans to appoint an interim leader in the next few weeks, and begin a national search for a new executive director to "lead our devoted staff and board up to and through our 10-year anniversary in 2018."

Sharpe had been a registrar at Tacoma Art Museum and also worked in collections at EMP before coming to head up NAAM in 2013 after the museum's first long-term director, Barbara Earl Thomas, stepped back into a fundraising role to focus more on making her own art. (Just this past weekend, Earl Thomas was voted the winner of the 2016 Stranger Genius Award in Art, and she also has a museum exhibition up now.)

"NAAM is fine," Earl Thomas said in a phone conversation this morning. "We're in the middle of our annual campaign and it's going well."

Another development director at the museum, Alex Curio, took a job recently in Chicago. Another long-time museum staffer, the widely respected Leilani Lewis, who'd been behind many of the museum's most vibrant and responsive events in the past few years, departed not long ago for a position at the University of Washington.

A new executive director will have plenty of potential to work with at NAAM thanks especially to the outreach of those vibrant events. There have been solo shows by contemporary artists, including C. Davida Ingram and Tariqa Waters, as well as traveling historical shows like the one currently up, Dance Theatre of Harlem: Forty Years of Firsts. This week, there's a talk on Thursday evening at the museum about perceptions of race in Seattle. A new series of lectures on the visual culture of the African continent and its diaspora is coming up.