Lower Education: Fisk, Randolph College Still Pursuing Art-for-Cash Gambit

Not monetized yet: Left, Georgia O'Keeffe, "Radiator Building at Night," Fisk University; Right, George Bellows, "Men of the Docks," Randolph College

In his Sunday column for the Tennessean, editorial page editor Dwight Lewis asks a question about Fisk University's plan to do a $30-million deal with Alice Walton. Unlike CultureGrrl, who had asked the same question, Lewis got an answer.

Dwight writes:

Since Fisk has won reaccreditation, does that mean school officials no longer want, or need, to sell the prestigious Alfred Stieglitz Collection [my link, not his] of modern art?

Here's the comment he received from a Fisk official (whom I had also queried, without success):

Fisk spokesman Ken West told me the sale of the Stieglitz collection is still on the table as far as university officials are concerned. "The university has to be in the black every year,'' West said.

Welcome to the Slippery Slope: Once the university embraced the concept of Desperation Deaccessions, it is a very short slide to exploiting art as an easy way to balance the books, even when the financial situation is no longer desperate.

Here's how the Tennessean's editor regards keeping the university "in the black every year":

I'm sure that can be done without selling [a half-share in] the Stieglitz collection, surely one of the finest art collections around. And it's a collection that Fisk can't afford to lose; nor should Nashville. And that's why, if Fisk officials ask for financial support from Nashvillians, even those of us who didn't attend the school, we should be willing to help in whatever way we can.

Fair enough, but let's add one condition: Financial pledges should be tied to a commitment by Fisk to keep its art collection (full time, not sometimes) where its donor, Georgia O'Keeffe, intended it to remain and where it can do the most good for the university's students and the surrounding Nashville community.

Meanwhile, 500 miles to the northeast, in Lynchburg, VA., Randolph College has just reached a final court settlement with the 20 plaintiffs who had unsuccessfully attempted to stop the planned sale of four paintings (one of which has thus far been sold) from the school's Maier Museum. Randolph College, like Fisk, had raised the specter of possible loss of accreditation from the Southern Association of Colleges and School (SACS) to justify its attempt to monetize its collection.

Carrie Sidener of the Lynchburg News & Advance reports:

Lynchburg Circuit Court Judge Leyburn Mosby signed an order distributing the $500,000 bond [my link, not hers] that secured the temporary injunction that barred the sale of the art in late 2007.

The bond is to be divided with $300,000 going to Randolph College. The remaining $200,000 and the interest on the bond is to be returned to the plaintiffs who raised the money in an attempt to stop the sale of four paintings from the museum.

Under the terms of the Settlement Agreement and Release, the parties cannot sue one another regarding the sale of the four paintings, nor can the plaintiffs sue buyers of those paintings.

Ellen Agnew, the Maier Museum's former associate director and one of the plaintiffs in this case, told me:

After much discussion and consideration, we agreed that we could not risk personal financial ruin by continuing legal action, although we still adamantly oppose Randolph College's selling its art to pay its bills.

This news development prompted my renewed queries to both the college's spokesperson and its president about the status of plans for the three works whose sale at Christie's was postponed when the art market tanked. They were as non-responsive to me as were Fisk's spokepersons.

But here's what Sidener learned:

The remaining three paintings have not yet been sold, said college spokeswoman Brenda Edson [whom I had unsuccessfully attempted to contact]. The college is waiting for improvements in the art market before selling those paintings.

In a January 2008 white paper, The Endowment and Our Art, Randolph's president, John Klein, announced that SACS had "removed the College from financial warning" and boasted that "overall giving to the College is up by more than 100 percent over last year." He then addressed the question raised by those who care about the integrity of college and university collections:

Does all of this good news mean we will not have to sell paintings from our wonderful collection? These days this is the question I hear most often, and the answer is that we are still planning to move forward with the sale [emphasis added]. It is not the answer I would like to give, and it is not an easy answer for many to accept. This has been a very difficult decision for our trustees....However, we all believe we must put the future of the College first, and the future of this College is dependent on financial stability.

It seems that once the idea of selling art for endowment is out of the box, it can't be stuffed back in, even when conditions no longer call for desperate measures.