The departure last month of Allison Wong from the Hono­lulu Museum of Art, where she was deputy director for operations and administration, follows a rash of rapid top-management changes at the 90-year-plus cultural lodestar, which received an infusion of youthful energy and fiscal stability during the five-year tenure of director Stephan Jost, who left in 2016 to lead the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto.

Under Jost, museum membership rose to 13,000 from 5,000, with most of the new members under 40 years old, and the institution’s debt declined to $2.4 million from $15.1 million.

In 2011 the Honolulu Academy of Arts merged with Spalding House, previously the Contemporary Museum of Art, where Wong was executive director.

Wong became deputy director of HoMA, and after Jost’s departure took the helm as interim director until Sean O’ Harrow was hired as director in 2017.

She stepped up again to lead the museum in 2019, when O’Harrow left to head the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Mo., and stepped down in January 2020, when current director Halona Norton­-Westbrook took over as top executive at HoMA after serving as director of curatorial affairs at the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio.

In April 2020, due to the pandemic, the museum, which was then temporarily closed, cut a third of its full-time staff and all part-time and seasonal workers, the Honolulu Star-Advertiser reported, noting that even before the COVID-19 outbreak in Hawaii, the museum’s trustees were faced with a series of tough financial decisions.

At the end of 2019, the museum had put two of its properties, Spalding House and Puu Panini, the historic Diamond Head home designed by Vladimir Ossipoff, up for sale.

On May 3 Kevin Imanaka, chief communications officer, confirmed in an email that Wong was no longer with the museum. He included a copy of an email sent to staff by Norton-­Westbrook the previous week, announcing that Wong would be leaving and the role of deputy director would “not be part of the staffing plan of the museum going forward.”

Instead, as part of a process of organizational restructuring, the museum would be recruiting “in the immediate future” for the newly created position of chief operating officer, Norton­-Westbrook said.

“This change is driven both by the circumstances that have shaped all of our lives in the last year and by our proactive creation of a strategic and operational plan that will guide our museum forward in the next five years,” she wrote.

In addition to providing oversight of all operational aspects of the museum, including human resources, finance, information technology, security, facilities and the cafe and shop, the COO “will guide forward a comprehensive strategy to optimize the efforts of teams across the museum and further evolve our approach to resource management and earned revenue,” Norton-­Westbrook wrote.

She asked the staff to join her in extending “our heartfelt thanks and gratitude for Allison’s work and dedication on behalf of HoMA,” and said the organization looked forward to supporting Wong in her next steps.

To aid in the transition, she announced, the museum would hire a consultant, Carol Bintz, former COO of the Toledo Museum of Art, for two months.

On Monday, Imanaka said Bintz had started work at HoMA, where, he added, “out of an abundance of caution due to COVID-19, much of our staff who aren’t visitor-­facing continue to work both remotely and on-campus as needed, and (Bintz’s) temporary role with the museum will be similar.”

Calls to Wong seeking comment were not returned.