There's a new voice, polite and soft-spoken, amid all the rancorous rhetoric surrounding Fisk University's Alfred Stieglitz Collection of Modern American and European Art. It belongs to Carol Creswell-Betsch — a Fisk alumna who, though self-described as "very uncomfortable with public attention," nevertheless finds herself at the center of the fierce legal battle over the collection's fate.
In October, Creswell-Betsch established a fund with the Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee "to benefit, in perpetuity, the display and care of the Alfred Stieglitz Collection at the Van Vechten Gallery at Fisk University," according to an affidavit by foundation president Ellen Lehman. She named the fund in honor of her mother, Pearl Creswell, the Stieglitz Collection's first and longest-serving curator.
When Creswell-Betsch heard of Fisk's original legal petition in 2005, which sought to sell outright Stieglitz donor Georgia O'Keeffe's "Radiator Building" and a work by Marsden Hartley, "it made me unhappy," she says. "And all the [subsequent] court costs and legal appeals have very much distressed me."
Creswell-Betsch says she began "talking to Fisk alums and others about what we could do. I had no idea how to get together enough money to save the university. But I thought a lot about how I could help the collection, this asset of Fisk, in a way that would be tangible and meaningful."
The fund has the support of Tennessee Attorney General Bob Cooper, Fisk's nemesis in the convoluted battle, who filed a brief Oct. 22 pointing to the Pearl Creswell Fund as an alternative. By leaving the Stieglitz Collection on display at Fisk at no cost to the university, he states, the fund "could not more closely approximate O'Keeffe's charitable purpose."
To put it mildly, Fisk disagreed. On Oct. 25, responding to Cooper, Fisk officials dismissed Creswell-Betsch's offer in terms that bordered on contempt. The university decried the fund as an "unsubstantiated plan purportedly funded by unknown donors and pledge amounts" — so much for Lehman's affidavit — and "another scheme which fails to address Fisk's survival."
Curiously, however, Fisk's response never mentions the Creswell Fund by name. Fisk administrators may have hesitated to mention the name "Creswell" because of the family's longstanding ties and undisputed commitment to the university. (Fisk President Hazel O'Leary did not return requests for comment by press time.) From a tactical standpoint, Carol Creswell-Betsch is much harder to demonize than the attorney general.
Creswell-Betsch's parents met as Fisk students and spent all of their working lives there. Her father, Isaiah T. Creswell, was Fisk's comptroller. Fisk President Charles S. Johnson selected her mother, Pearl, to curate the Stieglitz Collection. Creswell-Betsch literally grew up on the campus, living with her family in university housing. Today, she dwells in a house her parents built, surrounded by the university.
The fund that bears her mother's name has received commitments of $2.62 million, Lehman states. This amount, based on the foundation's usual investment return of 5 percent, "would generate a grant of at least $131,000 each year to Fisk." University officials have testified that Fisk annually spends this sum on exhibiting and maintaining the 101 artworks.
Commitments to the Pearl Creswell Fund are contingent, however, on a final court decision — by Chancellor Ellen Hobbs Lyle or the Tennessee Court of Appeals — that the fund is the best way to ensure the future of the Stieglitz Collection. Such a decision would spell the end of Fisk's proposal to sell a half-interest in the collection to the Crystal Bridges Museum in Arkansas for $30 million.
Yet the university has repeatedly claimed that, without a significant infusion of cash, Fisk is likely to close its doors — and the only way to raise the needed funds is by converting art to cash. Fisk needs legal permission for the Crystal Bridges deal due to a "no-sale" condition imposed by artist Georgia O'Keeffe in 1949. That's the year she donated the art to Fisk from the estate of her late husband, Alfred Stieglitz.
The legal fight between Fisk and the state has thus turned into a pitched battle over perhaps conflicting goals: keeping the collection available for view in Nashville, in accordance with O'Keeffe's wishes (as the state argues); or keeping Fisk alive as an institution and selling the art if necessary (as the university argues).
Caught in the middle are Carol Creswell-Betsch and other Fisk alums who do not want to see their alma mater lose one of its treasures. Creswell-Betsch says she intends to work just as strongly toward any capital campaign aimed at saving the university. But the Stieglitz Collection "is where my heart is, because of my mother and because it's been a part of me forever and ever," she explains.
"We have to try and save it for Fisk."
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