Judge Rejects Plan to Temporarily Move Fisk’s Art Collection to a Nashville Museum

Fisk University’s famous art collection, donated by Georgia O’Keeffe and valued at $74-million, may be spending time in Arkansas in the future, but it won’t be headed to a museum in downtown Nashville in the meantime, The Tennessean reported. On Tuesday, after more than 100 Fisk students protested the state attorney general’s plan to move the collection to the Frist Center for the Visual Arts until the university could better afford its upkeep, a state judge rejected that idea as a “short-term solution” and “insufficient.” The judge, Chancellor Ellen Hobbs Lyle, said her only alternative was to consider Fisk’s petition for permission to sell a $30-million share in the collection to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, in Bentonville, Ark. The judge has given Fisk and the attorney general until October 8 to submit plans that would ease Fisk’s financial responsibility for caring for the collection but stay true to the stated purpose of the gift—”to provide Nashvillians and Southerners access to the collection to promote the study of art.”