Fisk University’s Board of Trustees has agreed to share the institution’s valuable Alfred Stieglitz Collection of Modern American and European Art with a new museum in Arkansas founded by an heir to the Wal-Mart fortune.

The proposed deal, which would put $30-million in the coffers of financially struggling Fisk, faces review by a Tennessee judge, Chancellor Ellen Hobbs Lyle of the Davidson County Chancery Court, before it can go forward. The collection, amounting to 101 pieces of art, would be displayed for equal amounts of time at Fisk and at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, which is scheduled to open in Bentonville, Ark., in 2009.

“The people of the state of Tennessee stand to benefit from this arrangement, as does the city of Nashville,” said Hazel R. O’Leary, Fisk’s president, in a written statement. “But most importantly, those talented students from all over the world who have chosen Fisk’s rich academic environment as a place to cultivate their minds, hearts, and hands will have an alma mater that will do more to help them achieve their dreams.”

The artworks, donated by the painter Georgia O’Keeffe almost 50 years ago, have been at the center of a lengthy legal battle. Fisk decided in 2005 that it wanted to sell two pieces of art from the collection to replenish its endowment, among other things. But the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, acting on behalf of her estate, sued to block the sale. A settlement that would have allowed the college to sell one painting to the museum and the other on the open market was rejected in mid-September by Chancellor Lyle, who ruled that the offer from the Crystal Bridges Museum was a better alternative.

The O’Keeffe museum then dropped its lawsuit, but according to the The Tennessean, a Nashville newspaper, the museum has said publicly that it will go to court to try to block the Crystal Bridges deal. —Audrey Williams June