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Tuesday, January 06, 2009
Fisk University Appeals O'Keeffe Artwork Ruling
By Erik Schelzig
Associated Press
NASHVILLE, Tenn. — A court order has forced Fisk University to reopen a gallery displaying a collection donated by artist Georgia O'Keeffe, but the school isn't giving up its legal fight for the right to sell the artworks.
The state Court of Appeals is scheduled to hear arguments this week over last year's ruling that Fisk can't sell any of the donated artwork, and that it would lose the entire collection if it wasn't retrieved from storage and put back on display.
The gallery on Fisk's Nashville, Tennessee, campus reopened to little fanfare in October after nearly three years.
O'Keeffe donated the collection, including her own 1927 oil painting "Radiator Building — Night, New York," to the historically black university in 1949, a time when segregation prevented blacks in the southern United States from visiting many museums.
Lucius Outlaw Jr. said a recent visit to the gallery brought back memories of time spent studying the collection as a Fisk undergraduate in the mid-1960s. Outlaw, now a professor at Vanderbilt University and a critic of the school's management, said officials there haven't made enough of an effort to drive traffic to the collection.
"Obviously, a lot more could be done and should be done," said Outlaw, who disagreed with the decision to mount an appeal. "But I never thought trying to sell any of the collection was smart."
A Fisk spokesman did not immediately return a message seeking to find out how many people have visited the gallery since it reopened.
The artworks were part of a collection that belonged to O'Keeffe's late husband, photographer and art promoter Alfred Stieglitz. Art historians say the collection has an appealing unity because many of the American artists were part of O'Keeffe and Stieglitz's circle of friends. Besides two paintings by O'Keeffe, the 101-piece collection includes works by Picasso, Renoir, Cezanne, Marsden Hartley and Diego Rivera.
Saul Cohen, president of the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, said Fisk may be taking a different approach to marketing the gallery because its main focus is education, not art.
Still, he said, more could be done to attract visitors. "We have constant marketing," he said, targeting both adults and children. The New Mexico museum controls more than 50 percent of O'Keeffe's artwork and is the legal representative of her estate.
The museum intervened to prevent Fisk's 2005 decision to sell "Radiator Building" and Hartley's "Painting No. 3" because of O'Keeffe's conditions that the collection not be sold. The museum later unsuccessfully proposed to buy the O'Keeffe painting from Fisk and allow the school to sell the Hartley.
But the museum would still be in line to receive the collection if Fisk violates the court order. Cohen said his museum would seek to draw much more attention to the "Radiator Building."
"We would give it the attention that it deserves, that's for sure," he said.
Copyright ©2009 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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