NASHVILLE, Tenn.
Despite two years of trying, Fisk University hasn’t been able to turn any of the valuable art donated by painter Georgia O’Keeffe into cash.
While a legal fight over the latest $30 million proposal to share the 101-piece art collection with an Arkansas museum is scheduled for trial in February, leaders of the struggling historically Black university acknowledge that it could be years before any money changes hands.
So the school founded in 1866 to educate former slaves has had to look elsewhere to keep its doors open — a difficult task in a community that has been asked to come to the school’s financial rescue several times before.
“There is a fatigue factor there,” said Gov. Phil Bredesen, a Democrat and a former Nashville mayor. “There’s a lot of people who give money traditionally for valuable projects who have given money to Fisk in the past, who don’t think they’ve necessarily fixed the underlying problems.
“They are really in the mode of ‘I’m kind of through with that.’”
Fisk President Hazel O’Leary earlier this month set a goal of raising $6.2 million by June 30, an effort that got a big boost this month when the New York-based Andrew W. Mellon Foundation announced it would give the school grants worth up to $3 million.
The Mellon Foundation, which awards grants to historically Black colleges and universities among several other endeavors, said Fisk will receive $1 million up front.
A separate fundraising effort by Black churches in Nashville has netted about $25,000 so far.
Fisk’s board of trustees in December 2005 voted to try to sell off two signature pieces of the art collection to help keep the school afloat. Those efforts became bogged down in court battles over whether the sale of paintings violated the terms of O’Keeffe’s bequest, and a Fisk lawyer told the judge that the school was likely to run out of cash before the end of the year.
The Mellon grant has halted that cash-flow crisis, but some feel that the school waited too long to focus on fundraising efforts because of a preoccupation with selling the art that was donated in 1949.
