I ran the above headline (without the last word) once before, but maybe this time, they really mean it:
The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, has announced that it is dropping its quest to wrest the Stieglitz Collection from Fisk University.
The museum might have appealed Chancellor Ellen Hobbs Lyle‘s decision, arguing that Fisk had already amply demonstrated its inability to fulfill the conditions of O’Keeffe’s 1949 gift of the collection, no matter what the university might now say. But like Chancellor Lyle, it’s giving the university a second chance.
Reginald Stuart, in Diverse: Issues in Higher Education, has the story. The O’Keeffe Museum’s chairman, Saul Cohen, told Stuart:
You don’t appeal when you have won. Our goal was not to get the collection back and taken away from Fisk. Our goal was to establish that Fisk was legally bound to follow the conditions [of the gift]. And that has been done. As far as we are concerned, it’s a complete victory.
So maybe the O’Keeffe Museum wasn’t just being self-serving, after all. Or maybe it just felt that an appeal, at this time, would be a loser. I would bet, though, that they’ll be back in court if Fisk doesn’t meet the court’s tight Oct. 6 deadline for renovating the university’s art gallery and putting the collection back on display.
Stuart reports:
Cohen said the museum “will remain concerned that Fisk do what the court has ordered Fisk to do. If they violate the rule now, they’d be in contempt of court,” he said, leaving the door open for the museum to move quickly to take possession of the collection.
The pressure is on.