NASHVILLE (AP) - Fisk University said Friday it has completed an agreement with an Arkansas museum to share ownership of the Stieglitz Art Collection.
The courts have allowed the school to sell a 50 percent stake in the collection to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville. The financially strapped Fisk gets $30 million under the arrangement.
Fisk said the 101-piece collection donated by the late painter Georgia O'Keeffe, under the present plan, will be rotated every two years between the school and the museum. The collection will remain at Fisk through fall 2013 and then move to the museum.
Final details of the arrangement were approved Thursday by a Nashville judge.
O'Keeffe had stipulated that the collection never be sold. A legal battle over the issue lasted more than a decade.
Fisk, a historically black university, had said the school might have to close if it didn't sell the stake to the museum, bui lt by Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton.
The collection includes works by Picasso, Renoir, Cezanne, Marsden Hartley and Charles Demuth among others. O'Keeffe also donated four of her paintings to the school because Fisk educated blacks in the segregated south.
The state of Tennessee had fought to keep the collection in Nashville. State lawyers argued that allowing the deal would have a chilling effect on future donations because O'Keeffe's stipulations were not followed. They also said the collection is part of Nashville's cultural history and needs to be protected because of the risk that it could be lost to Fisk's creditors.
The donation, made in 1949, was part of the estate of her husband, photographer Alfred Stieglitz.