Fisk Changes Its Tune and Will Fund Gallery for Stieglitz Collection

I guess Fisk University agreed with my suggestion that "if it doesn't want to the collection to be removed from Nashville to [the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum] in Santa Fe," it needed to demonstrate at this week's trial in Davidson Chancery Court that it is able "to properly care for and display the [Stieglitz] collection" that was given to it by Georgia O'Keeffe.

Yesterday, the second day of the trial to determine whether the collection should be relinquished to the O'Keeffe museum as successor-in-interest ot the artist's estate, Fisk President Hazel O'Leary suddenly stopped pleading poverty---the argument she had used in her campaign to market individual works or to sell a half-share in the entire collection to Alice Walton's Crystal Bridges Museum.

Jonathan Marx of the Tennessean reports:

Fisk University President Hazel O'Leary told a judge Wednesday that the school is ready and able to fund renovations to its Carl Van Vechten Gallery, which has housed the school's Alfred Stieglitz Collection of modern art....

"We have invested time, energy and resources into developing our advancement staff ... and Fisk's position is that it is receiving an extraordinary infusion of cash." Some of those funds, she said, would be used to complete renovations on the Van Vechten Gallery.

Finally, they're raising money the old-fashioned way. That should have been the first resort, not the last resort. Fisk had previously argued that conditions in its gallery were inappropriate for proper care of the art. The works are currently in storage at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Nashville---which I believe might ultimately be the best partner to work out a Nashville-based solution for the collection and its care.

Randolph College, do you copy?