A year ago, Crawl Space gallery had a five-year expansion plan and its first-ever staff director. Now, rather than violate its basic mandate—"Be awesome," as member artist Anne Mathern once said—it's closing forever. It turned out it wasn't possible to be awesome and to be bigger, or even, at this point, to go back to Crawl Space's roots as a true small collective. "I just think things in the U.S. are not supposed to be permanent," Mathern said. "They just can't be or they just suck. Someone else gets to do something awesome now."

Crawl Space was never just a gallery. When it started six years ago, it was a stage for a handful of hungry young artists who'd recently graduated from the University of Washington. Then, as members turned over—Mathern is the only one who's been there the entire time; today's lineup is Mathern, Diana Falchuk, Matt Browning, Brendan Jansen, and Jennifer Towner—it became a lab. The artists still wanted to show their own work, but they also wanted to try on ideas, invite outsiders, and host a residency.

The final expansion plan would have turned Crawl Space into something very close to a Canadian artist-run center with member artists functioning as a curatorial board. They no longer wanted the pay-to-play dues model. But dues are how artist collectives get funded. What happened instead is that Crawl Space's new staff director, the savvy and capable Jennifer Campbell (a Vancouver, BC, native and artist who'd also run a space in Montreal), worked almost full-time for an entire year—with zero pay. Campbell was someone the members trusted and believed in, but when it came time for the heavy administrative work of doubling the budget in order to come up with that salary, the members realized they just didn't have the will, Mathern said. There'd be no point in finding another director, because any director worth the job would need to be paid. "Instead of dragging out an organization to its death, we decided to go out on a high note," Campbell said. Given the circumstances, that's for the best.

An inordinate number of my great memories of Seattle art are from Crawl Space (which has been short-listed for a Stranger Genius Award twice): squinting at Brad Biancardi's low-lit paintings of national government buildings in the middle of Bush's second term, as if they were X-rays and the disease was advanced and mysterious; discovering in Falchuk's sewn-fruit sculptures tiny acts of total benevolence; falling in love with a small rectangle of stretched yarn unraveled from baseballs by Browning. Two of my top-10 shows last year were at Crawl Space, including one of the best shows in recent history in the city, by Mathern and Chad Wentzel.

Crawl Space's final show, Stranger Circumstances, opens November 7. It's a group exhibition devoted to awkward, open-ended, and hopeful encounters between artists and strangers. Miss you already, Crawl Space.