I was in Nashville, TN for a couple of days last week, where I gave a lecture at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts and spent time at Fisk University visiting the storied Carl Van Vechten Gallery, and viewing some of the partially restored Aaron Douglas murals on campus. The Frist is housed in a magnificent beaux arts building that used to be home to Nashville's main post office. Built between 1933-1934 the edifice was transferred and by the City of Nashville in 1998 and repurposed to become the home of the Frist Center for Visual Arts, a non-collecting museum that both originates its own exhibitions and presents notable touring exhibitions as well. The range of their rich exhibition program is suggested by the three provocative main exhibitions currently on view.

"The Best of Photography and Film from the George Eastman House Collection" contained a veritable history of photography, with works such as Dorothea Lang's "Migrant Mother," Matthew Brady's iconic portrait of Abraham Lincoln, Lewis Hine's "Powerhouse Mechanic," and various other photographs by Nan Goldin, Stephen Shore, Garry Winogrand, and numerous others rounding out this collection of the medium's greatest hits. I was able to catch an early Charlie Chaplin film that was being screened that gave an hilarious sense of this comedic genius's subversive humor.

Lalla Essaydi's large color prints of Morrocan woman in her variously staged henna painted tableaus made an impressive appearance in the Center's Gordon Contemporary Artist Project gallery space, a series of rooms that showed her provocative work Indelible off to full advantage. Auguste Rodin gets his full due in an exhibition Rodin: A Magnificent Obsession, Sculptures from the Collection of the Iris and Gerald Cantor Foundation, that was as densely packed and robust as the title suggests. Complete with over sixty sculptures, along with photographs, papers, and drawings from this French artist, the exhibition struck me as being even more densely loaded with work than the Musee Rodin itself in Paris. For sure, you won't find any sculptures by Rodin's young, talented, and tortured student turned dejected and abandoned lover Camille Claudell among this selection, though the Musee Rodin in Paris contains a few small examples (or at least did when I was there years ago). This is an exegesis of the man himself, covering all periods of his work.

While waiting to give my lecture at the Frist that evening--which was planned to coincide with the Eastman House exhibition of photography--the museum staff was kind enough to drive me to Fisk University so I could see the Carl Van Vechten Gallery, which houses the Alfred Stieglitz Collection, which was given the university by Steiglitz's wife Georgia O'Keefe in 1948, and meet the director and curator Victor Simmons. Housed in a former chapel on the campus of this venerable historically black university, the Carl Van Vechten Gallery of Fine Art opened in 1949. It was Van Vechten--photographer, novelist, art, music, and dance critic, white documenter and of the black Harlem Renaissance, and friend of then Fisk president Dr. Charles Strugeon Johnson--who orchestrated the gift of the Alfred Steiglitz Collection to Fisk. Eventually converted to the first gymnasium on the campus of a black college or university from 1903 to 1949, the Gallery also previously housed studio space for art students and faculty, and became the sculpture studio during the 1960s and 70s. It was rededicated in 1984 for its current use.

Fisk was founded in 1866 to educate former slaves. The university has long attracted a stellar group of artists to its campus, beginning perhaps with the Fisk Jubilee Singers, the group formed in 1871 who went on to tour nationally, introducing African American spirituals into the American cultural lexicon in the process. The noted artist and African American art historian David Driskell was the chair of the art department from 1966-1976, succeeding Aaron Douglas, the legendary artist and muralist of the Harlem Renaissance who founded the university's Art Department in 1937, and subsequently taught there for twenty-nine years. Sculptor Martin Puryear taught at Fisk for two years after receiving his MFA from Yale School of Art in 1971. Other Fisk alums include scholars W.E.B. Dubois and John Hope Franklin, and the poet Nikki Giovanni. Aaron Douglas's murals still grace the walls of Fisk, and I was able to view one of these wonderful restored inspired modernist works while I was there. They have undergone extensive renovation, and the restored areas give every indication of the inspired way in which these murals transformed the learning environment into a space of inspired aspiration.

(http://eyelevel.si.edu.2008/10/stop-loss-resto.html)

Like many historically black college and universities, Fisk has found itself in a climate of declining economic fortunes. These declining fortunes began in the 1960 and 70s when wealthy white patrons began withdrawing their support in light of the growing Black Power sentiments then sweeping the campus that threatened their sense of benevolent patronage. As a result the school has struggled throughout its history to raise money, and indeed nearly closed twenty years ago for lack of funds. As such they have periodically looked to the art collection as a possible solution to their economic woes. Among the university's collection of some 3,000 objects are included a plethora of American modernist masterworks, including those in the Steiglitz Collection. An attempt was made in 2005 by the university to sell two of them--Marsden Hartley's "Painting No. 3" and O'Keefe's "Radiator Building--Night, New York" on the open market for an estimated $10-20 million. Attempting to establish absolute ownership over the works, the university went to court. While opponents of this deaccessioning move say it violates the spirit of the gift (which called for the works to be kept by the school and never sold), representatives of the college have called it a "no-brainer," an easy way out of a recurring dilemma. They further entered into an agreement with the Crystal Bridges Museum in Arkansas to "share" the collection in return for a $30 million payment.

Other interests (inlcuding O'Keefe heirs and the Georgia O'Keefe Museum in New Mexico) have also sought to have the collection removed from the university entirely in light of its flawed stewardship. Earlier this year, however, a judge in the Tennesee court found that Fisk had in fact violated the terms and covenant governing its possession of the collection, but not to an extent that would warrant removing the collection from the institution as the O'Keefe heirs and Museum had requested. The judge further imposed a mandatory injunction, preventing Fisk "from ever selling the Stieglitz Collection." Of the efforts by the O'Keef Museum to remove the collection from Fisk, Yale University Art Gallery Director Jock Reynolds (who testified in court in favor of the collection remaining intact at Fisk) called the O'Keefe museum administrators, "the most hypocritical bunch of looters I've ever ran across." Others have echoed these sentiment in less dramatic terms. "Getting rid of the Radiator Building is like an institution getting rid of an amazing set of scientific papers. It's really unfortunate that they can't find a way to maintain their legacy and find other ways of supporting their institution," said Dr. Rick Powell, head of Duke's Department of Art and History. How Fisk will solve its recurring economic problems remains to be seen.

The visit to the Alfred Stieglitz Collection afforded me yet another opportunity for a close encounter with a photograph that I have thought a lot about, Steiglitz's The Steerage. It is the picture about which Steiglitz has said, "If all of my photographs were lost, and I were represented by only The Steerage, that would be quite alright." What has always intrigued me about this photograph, and Stieglitz's dramatic description of it making, is that it is, in its social implications, an entirely singular photograph within the photographer's oeuvre; he never made another picture that so strikingly declared its intent at richly describing a particular social paradox. That Stieglitz--at this time married to an heiress whose wealth only further freed him from the need for the usual labor--who had long lived a life a of privilege, would be so moved to make and claim this pictures as a singular accomplishment that summed up, "the feeling I had about life," yet never again pursue the road that it suggested is something I find perplexing.

I've often thought that perhaps Stieglitz's embrace, mentoring and exhibiting of the works by the younger photographer Paul Strand became a kind of surrogate enactment of this social impulse. Strand, of course, was even more deeply committed to photographing the prevailing social circumstances and contradictions, and his picture Blind Woman, from 1916 for example is even more unflinching in its observation of the dispossessed than The Steerage. Perhaps in the way that John Szarkowski came to live vicariously through his close involvement with Garry Winogrand and his work, so did Stieglitz, perhaps, live out his latent need for a keener social observation through Paul Strand. Its the only explanation I've been able to come up with to explain the "one off" quality of this picture. Contrary to what we often know, history consists of all kinds of relationships and transferences after all.