A splinter group of alumni of financially troubled Fisk University, publicly asserting its opposition to the school’s plan to raise badly needed money by selling half its ownership in the Alfred Stieglitz Collection of photographs and art, has emerged with a $2.6 million plan it says will generate enough money annually to cover the costs of caring for and exhibiting the collection and give school officials time to find other ways to raise funds for the historic institution.
The alumni plan, lead by Carol Creswell-Betsch, a member of the Fisk Class of 1955 and the daughter of the first curator of the collection at Fisk, was disclosed Friday in legal papers filed with the Chancery Court of Tennessee by Tennessee Attorney General Robert Cooper, a staunch opponent of the school’s ownership sale plan. Cooper has asserted the plan strays far from the binding “no sale, no loan” provisions of the restrictive covenants Fisk agreed to in the late 1940s and early 1950s when it accepted the art as a gift.
Cooper, on Friday, was responding to the newest proposal by Fisk to sell half its interest in the collection to the Arkansas-based Crystal Bridges Museum for $30 million. That deal would also allow the museum to take the collection off the school’s campus for two-year periods between now and 2017 after which a Collection Committee would devise an exhibition schedule.
In Friday’s filing, the Attorney General also advised Judge Ellen Hobbs Lyle, the judge presiding over Fisk’s sale efforts, that Tennessee’s State Museum had stepped forward to participate in a proposed plan for relieving Fisk of its responsibilities for the collection while retaining ownership. Cooper presented an affidavit from the head of the State Museum saying the facility would care for and exhibit the Collection at no cost to Fisk, if Judge Lyle found either the ownership sale plan or Fisk alumni plan acceptable and if
Nashville’s Frist Center for the Visual Arts was unacceptable or could not make good on its offer to help. Lyle had earlier turned down a Cooper plan that proposed the Frist as a temporary home for the collection.
Cooper also asserted that the revised Fisk ownership sale plan would leave the school vulnerable to losing complete ownership of the collection since approving it would change the legal status of the collection from a gift, exempt from any claims filed against the school by a creditor in the event of its bankruptcy, to an asset. In the event of a school bankruptcy, which looms as a possibility, the collection would be considered “fair game” by creditors as one of the institutions’ assets.
“In fact, there is no way in which Fisk can modify its agreement with the Crystal Bridges Museum to protect the Collection from potential creditors (including the Museum) in the event of financial distress,” Cooper says in his papers opposing the revised Fisk-Crystal Bridges plan. “In order to lift the no-sale condition and approve the Crystal Bridges agreement, this court must find that Georgia O’Keeffe gave the Collection to Fisk to ensure the university’s continued financial existence. Such a holding, however, would irrevocably change the character of the gift and remove the protected status that the Collection now enjoys from creditors, particularly in any bankruptcy proceedings involving Fisk.”
