Fisk University and the Arkansas-based Crystal Bridges Museum have dotted the “i’s” and crossed the “t’s” on a major revision of their plan that gives Fisk $30 million cash in exchange for selling Crystal Bridges 50 percent ownership of Fisk’s prestigious Alfred Stieglitz Collection of art and photographs and giving the museum considerable control over the future of the collection.
In a legal brief filed Friday in Nashville in the Chancery Court for the State of Tennessee, 20th Judicial District, Fisk told Judge Ellen Hobbs Lyle that the school and museum had eliminated from an earlier deal numerous passages of language Lyle had found objectionable and would bar their proposal from being considered as part of her deliberations on whether to excuse Fisk from “no sale, no loan” restrictions on the collection.
The “no sale, no loan” restrictions were part of an agreement Fisk made with artist Georgia O’Keeffe in the late 1940s and early 1950s when she gave the collection to the school. The collection includes photographs by Stieglitz and paintings by O’Keeffe, Renoir, Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove, Cezanne and Diego Rivera. The works were part of the estate of Stieglitz, O’Keeffe’s late husband.
Fisk has been asking the courts for five years to approve various proposals to monetize the collection, arguing most recently that its pauper status makes it “impracticable” under established cy pres legal standards for the school to continue maintaining the collection. By selling an interest in the collection, Fisk asserts it will be able to raise badly needed funds to keep the shrinking school open. Selling the collection and allowing it to leave the campus for extended periods of time are barred by the agreement with O’Keeffe.
Lyle, who has found the school financially unable to continue maintaining the collection, is being asked by Fisk to waive the restrictions and allow the sale to go forward, a proposal strongly opposed by the state’s attorney general and some Fisk alumni. They say the gift sale would hurt overall giving to Fisk and other institutions by donors who fear their gift rules would someday be cast aside.
In Friday’s filing, Fisk says most of the court’s proposals set forth in a 14 September memorandum and order “have been adopted wholesale,” including elimination of a number of provisions regarding secured loans, transfer of interest and Delaware Limited Liability Corporation language. Lyle found that those provisions could result in Fisk eventually losing full ownership of the collection valued at $74 million.
The new Fisk-Crystal Bridges plan throws many management details to a potentially powerful “Collection Committee” and significantly veers from the original exhibition schedule proposed by the two. In response to Lyle’s call for a more specific six-month rotation schedule, Fisk and Crystal Bridges proposed a two-year rotation plan with schedule decisions in later years left to their “Collection Committee.” Its members were not identified.
