The Henry Art Gallery—"Washington State’s oldest art museum showcasing the newest ideas" is its slogan—has decided to eliminate its chief curator position, held for the last 11 years by Elizabeth Brown, who will depart in mid-October. Brown most notably and recently organized I Myself Have Seen It: Photography & Kiki Smith (2010), and in 2004 she created WOW: The Work of the Work. Brown has been a brilliant, if sometimes ornery, figure. She has been a friend to artists and intellectuals, and a powerful thinker. She also is an inspired educator. I will miss her. She was not immediately available for comment, so I'm not sure what's next for Brown. I hope she'll stay in Seattle (maybe she and Derrick Cartwright might join forces in some way).

Instead of a chief curator, the museum, which is located on campus at the University of Washington and is a public-private partnership, will employ a Deputy Director of Art and Education, adding an educational role to the curatorial leader of the museum. (Brown is an educator, but she may have objected to the combining of the roles.) The national search will begin soon. On the phone this morning, Henry director Sylvia Wolf said the change reflects the museum's new strategic plan, adopted last month, which calls for the museum to become a "creative commons."

"I like to think of the analogy of a 19th-century museum being akin to a cathedral where you go in and have a spiritual experience in a hushed environment—and I like to think of where we're headed as the piazza in front of the cathedral...a very dynamic place for a variety of people of various interests," Wolf said.

That sounds fine. It also echoes shopworn rhetoric in museology and across cultural nonprofits (where mantras of accessibility, multiplicity of voices, et cetera, have become commonplace), and it's hard to know what it will mean in practice.

We don't really know what's to come at the Henry, but we know it won't include Brown, and it won't include a chief curator, and it will include an educator, but not quite an education director—rather, half of one. Welcome to museums in 2011.