Fisk University’s plan to sell half interest in its most valuable asset—a 101-piece collection of art and photographs—for $30 million to Arkansas’s Crystal Bridges Museum won conditional approval Tuesday from a Tennessee judge who has blocked the sale twice in recent years, most recently last month.
Fisk, financially broke and threatening to close its doors without the cash windfall, immediately hailed the sudden turn of encouraging legal news and said it would meet the court’s conditions as outlined in the judge’s order.
Judge Ellen Hobbs Lyle of the Chancery Court of Tennessee, Twentieth Judicial District, in Nashville, had ordered the state and Fisk, in an August 20 ruling, to present plans for relieving Fisk of its responsibility for the collection. Lyle’s ruling was based on her agreement with Fisk’s statements in court that the school’s precarious financial condition made it “impracticable” for the school to continue to maintain and exhibit the art collection.
The collection had been given to Fisk, with strict no-sale, no-loan provisions, in the late 1940s and early 1950s by the late artist Georgia O’Keeffe, widow of photographer Alfred Stieglitz, both of New York. In the August order, Lyle gave the state until September 10 to file a plan for relieving the school of the collection and Fisk until October 8 to respond to the state plan.
In Monday’s late ruling, coming on the heels of several Nashville protest events called by Fisk President Hazel O’Leary against the state’s plan, Lyle said she had reviewed the state’s plan, a plan the state thought had been drawn to address her detailed requirements set forth in her August 20 ruling and found it unacceptable.
While praising the state’s top legal counsel for his efforts, Lyle faulted the state’s plan as a “temporary fix” that was “insufficient” to permanently resolve the issue of how to best relieve Fisk of its legal responsibility to care for, maintain, and exhibit the collection under the terms of an agreement with the collection’s donor. “The parties have been in court over the collection long enough,” she declared. “Finality and certainty is needed.”
“The best the attorney general has been able to do is to propose a short-term solution,” Lyle wrote in a seven-page opinion and order accompanied by a 21-page memo outlining the changes she wanted in the Crystal Bridges plan. “The option the court must turn to at this point is to modify the Crystal Bridges Museum Agreement, Fisk has proposed, to make the Agreement more closely approximate the donor’s intent,” the judge wrote.
