Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker is leaving the Frye Art Museum after her contract runs out at the end of September 2016.

Birnie Danzker and the board say that Birnie Danzker made the announcement to the staff back in June, that the split was Birnie Danzker's choice to move on, and that the board and Birnie Danzker are mutually highly pleased with each other and ready to happily part ways.

But it's odd that the museum didn't announce anything. Instead, as the upcoming Genius exhibition got closer and closer, the word spread among the dozens of Seattle artists included in the show. They're all quite interested; the Frye is the Seattle museum that has shown the greatest commitment to Seattle artists, and Birnie Danzker's tenure has made that a calling card. Does the museum want to go in a different direction? What really happened between Birnie Danzker and the board?

It's not a good look for a museum when the people in charge of the situation over the long haul (the trustees) leave the impression that there's nobody at the steering wheel.

When I called Jeffrey Hirsch, museum spokesman, this morning, he said there was no press release because it just seemed like "old news."

That sort of thing naturally leaves a journalist with the distinct impression that she's not getting the whole story. I'll update if I find out more.

For now, here's what we know.

I talked to board president David Buck, a Seattle attorney, who said, "She’s done a fabulous job for us, and she’s one of the best curators in the world, so we’ve been very lucky to have her for as long as we have."

About the museum's future, he said we can expect to see a continuation of "what you've seen us do."

I asked what he meant specifically, whether he meant the Frye would continue its devotion to Seattle artists as well as ones from across the globe. He said:

I do mean that, and I mean opening up more instead of being closed off. We’ve been historically within our four walls, and we want to be more out there, we want to be more of a cultural hub on First Hill. We want to continue to grow our support and attendance in a younger demographic. And we want to showcase local artists that have national reputations but often aren’t so well-known in Seattle. And the scholarship that Jo-Anne has brought to us, that’s certainly something we want to carry on, the work on our historical collections, writing good catalogs to memorialize our shows, drawings lessons from the past that apply to the present. So I don’t see a big course change. I just see refinements consistent with our strategic planning.

The museum will probably retain a consultant and conduct a national, possibly international, search, to launch sometime in the next three months, Buck said.

Birnie Danzker, Australian by birth and upbringing, is a sharp mind and a force—like a forceful force, with gravity and velocity. She has accomplished much in her time at the Frye, often in the area of historical research and scholarship on subjects including the relationship between Mark Tobey and Teng Baiye (Seattle/Shanghai) and the Munich Secession, while also presenting the works of living local artists, and commissioning them to make new works, often in large group exhibitions including Moment Magnitude, Your Feast Has Ended, and the upcoming Genius.

At the same time, two curators have departed during Birnie Danzker's nearly 7-year tenure, and no one has replaced them. Birnie Danzker does more direct curating than most directors; was she stepping on curatorial toes or just difficult to work with? What would that mean exactly? Nobody would ever quite tell me—on the record. The two curators (Robin Held, Scott Lawrimore) and Birnie Danzker are also three extremely intelligent, exacting people with mighty personalities, and maybe the Frye was a little too small for multiple bigs.

Before she came to the Frye, Birnie Danzker was a curator and director at the Vancouver Art Gallery, for 10 years, and at the Museum Villa Stuck in Munich, Germany, for 15 years. This time, she told me she told herself, she was going to leave before she was past the time when she was doing her best work. And this seemed like the right time. Her two-year extension on her original five-year contract expires in October 2016, and that's when she'll leave.

"I think it’s very important to know when to move to the next challenge or the next stage of what it is that one wants to do," Birnie Danzker said. "I think 8 years is a pretty good time. And one always should leave when things are going really well."

In the next year she'll be finalizing contracts and details on three exhibitions that are not quite pinned down, but which she hopes will happen at the Frye: the first American retrospective of the Blue Rider group artist Alexei Jawlensky, for 2017, organized jointly with the Neue Galerie New York; a Barbizon School survey, "with some stunning Corot works," for 2018; and for 2016, a monograph on Wilhelm Hammershoi, co-produced with the National Gallery of Denmark.

She's busy with those, she says, so not thinking much about what comes after October 2016. But she's also often off on trips to China; soon she's giving a paper in China at a development forum for all the private museums in China. That kind of work will continue, she said.

The Frye trustees have her full vote of confidence, she also said:

I really want to pay tribute to the trustees as I have done on many occasions. They have never been anything other than supportive of the intellectual and creative program, artistic program, community programs, support for scholarship, support for seattle artists—they have never hesitated. And we’ve put on some pretty challenging exhibitions, and there’s never been any time where they suggested or even hinted that they were not supporting those initiatives. And I’d say in that sense, the Frye Art Museum has offered me extraordinary opportunities to experiment not only in terms of the individual subject matter of exhibitions, but also what the function of the museum is in the 21st century, what is the function of a curator, and Genius is another part of that, Moment Magnitude was, Your Feast Has Ended. ...So that level of support has been I think not only a blessing for me but I think it’s a blessing for the community at large, that we have had those opportunities and possibilities...

I love what I’m doing. I’m not leaving the Frye because I don’t love what I’m doing. I think it offers an extraordinary opportunity and intellectual context, and I really want to acknowledge the Seattle public. That audience is one of the most open, welcoming intellectual audiences that I’ve known. Our attendance has gone up enormously. People are staying with us and staying with the conversation and debates in a very open manner.

And we, the people, will continue looking, listening, and thinking about what's going on at the Frye as another chapter is drafted.