AP — JUDGE RULES NEW MEXICO MUSEUM WILL STAY IN O’Keeffe ART LAWSUIT

AVV 12-26 #723880

By Erik Schelzig

Associated Press Writer

NASHVILLE, TENN. (AP) — Fisk University’s attempt to dismiss the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum from a lawsuit over the school’s attempt to sell a stake in a collection donated by the artist has been denied.

Davidson County Chancellor Ellen Hobbs Lyle ruled December 21 that the New Mexico museum has the right to be involved in the case because it represents O’Keeffe’s estate.

Lyle also declined to rule out the possibility that the entire 101-piece collection could revert back to the New Mexico museum if the historically black university loses its case.

Neither the school nor the museum immediately returned calls seeking comment December 21.

Fisk is seeking approval to sell a 50 percent stake in the collection to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art for $30 million. Under that arrangement, the collection would travel between Nashville and the Bentonville, Ark., museum founded by Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton.

Lyle said that New York law determines the O’Keeffe Museum’s status in the case because the artist lived in that state when she donated the 101 artworks to the school in 1949.

The artworks include O’Keeffe’s own 1927 oil painting, “Radiator Building — Night, New York,” and works by Pablo Picasso, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Marsden Hartley, Charles Demuth and Alfred Maurer.

The donation was part of the nearly 1,000-piece collection of O’Keeffe’s husband, photographer and art promoter Alfred Stieglitz, that she gave away after he died in 1946. O’Keeffe died in 1986.

The O’Keeffe Museum argues Fisk’s sale to Crystal Bridges should be rejected because of O’Keeffe’s condition that her donation not be sold. The museum claims the school is also violating O’Keeffe’s wishes that the collection be on display.

Fisk’s Carl Van Vechten Gallery, which houses the collection at Fisk, has fallen into disrepair and the entire collection has been in storage at Nashville’s Frist Center for the Visual Arts since November 2005.

Fisk, which was founded in 1866 to educate former slaves, has struggled financially throughout its history.