The best collection of art in Nashville does not hang in the building most Nashvillians would guess.
It is not at the Frist, the former Art Deco post office on Broadway that draws crowds for touring exhibitions. It is not in any of the galleries that line Fifth Avenue or the Gulch. It is on the campus of Fisk University, on a hill above Jefferson Street, inside a converted nineteenth-century gymnasium that most people in Nashville have never entered. The collection includes Picasso, Cézanne, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec, Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove, Charles Demuth, Diego Rivera, and nineteen photographs by Alfred Stieglitz. And the painting that anchors the whole room: Georgia O’Keeffe’s Radiator Building — Night, New York, a portrait of a skyscraper at night with her husband’s name glowing in red neon on a neighboring building — a joke and a love letter painted on the same canvas.
That this collection exists at Fisk at all is a story about three friendships, one death, and a woman who understood exactly what she was doing.
Alfred Stieglitz died on July 13, 1946, in New York. He was eighty-two. He had spent his life in the service of two ideas: that photography was fine art, and that American modernism deserved a place in the conversation alongside anything coming out of Europe. His gallery at 291 Fifth Avenue had shown Picasso and Cézanne to Americans before most Americans knew who they were. He had championed Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove, John Marin, and his wife, Georgia O’Keeffe, when the establishment considered them fringe. By the time he died, his collection — over 850 paintings and thousands of photographs — was one of the most significant private holdings of modern art in the country.
His will was simple on this point: the collection should go to non-profit institutions that would keep it accessible to the public for the study of art. The job of deciding where fell to his widow.
O’Keeffe spent three years going through the collection, cataloging, sorting, placing works with museums across the country. The Metropolitan Museum of Art received a portion. The Art Institute of Chicago. The National Gallery. The Philadelphia Museum. These were expected. The sixth institution on her list was not.
The connection ran through Carl Van Vechten.
Van Vechten was a New York writer, photographer, and cultural impresario — a white man who had embedded himself in the Harlem Renaissance so thoroughly that he was either its most important patron or its most complicated one, depending on who you asked. He photographed Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Billie Holiday, and Bessie Smith. He used his connections to get Black writers published by white houses. He was generous, flamboyant, and permanently entangled in the question of who gets to participate in whose culture.
He was also close friends with Charles S. Johnson.
Johnson was a sociologist, the editor of Opportunity magazine, and, by the late 1940s, the first Black president of Fisk University. He and Van Vechten had worked the Harlem Renaissance together — Johnson organizing the events, Van Vechten opening the doors. Their friendship had survived thirty years and two very different careers. When Johnson took over Fisk, Van Vechten began directing his philanthropic energy toward the university. He donated his personal archive. He recruited the painter Aaron Douglas to chair the art department. And when Georgia O’Keeffe began distributing Stieglitz’s estate, Van Vechten made the ask.
It was not a casual request. Van Vechten understood something about the geography of American art: the great collections were all in the north and on the coasts. The South had almost nothing, and what it had was segregated. A Black student at Fisk in 1949 could not walk into most museums in the region and see a Picasso. Van Vechten proposed that the Picasso come to them.
O’Keeffe agreed. She later told the New York Times it was “a good thing to do at this time” — a phrase that said everything by saying almost nothing. She believed it would have pleased Stieglitz. She wanted the work seen by people who otherwise wouldn’t have access to it. She selected 101 pieces: ninety-seven from the Stieglitz estate and four of her own paintings, including Radiator Building.
Her conditions were absolute: the collection must never be sold. It must never be broken up. It must be displayed together for the study of art.
Fisk had no gallery. It had a gymnasium — a Romanesque brick building from 1888 whose construction had been championed by a young student named W.E.B. Du Bois. Johnson ordered it converted. When the renovation was complete, they named it the Carl Van Vechten Gallery, for the man who had made the connection.
On November 4, 1949, Georgia O’Keeffe came to Nashville for the dedication.
She was sixty-two, already one of the most famous living artists in the world, and she stood in a converted gym on a Black university campus in the segregated South and presented the collection to Johnson and the students. Aaron Douglas was there. Van Vechten was there. Pearl Creswell, the gallery’s first curator, was there. O’Keeffe told the audience she hoped the collection would show them that there were “many ways of seeing and thinking.”
Then she left, and the collection stayed. Picasso in Nashville. Cézanne in Nashville. Renoir in Nashville. A Gaboon reliquary figure from West Africa, included because Stieglitz had been one of the first gallerists in America to exhibit African sculpture as art rather than artifact. And the Radiator Building, glowing black and gold on the wall, with Stieglitz’s name in red neon — his widow’s tribute hanging in a gymnasium on a hill above Jefferson Street, about as far from Fifth Avenue as you could get and still be in a gallery.
The collection is still there. Or rather, it is there half the time — the other half it spends in Arkansas, a story for another moment.
But when it is on the wall at Fisk, it remains what it has been since 1949: the single finest collection of modern art in Nashville, in one of the most unlikely locations in the American art world. You can walk in off the street. The gallery is small and quiet and usually not crowded. The Cézanne is there. The Picasso is there. The Renoir is there. And the Radiator Building is there — O’Keeffe’s night painting of a New York skyscraper, with a red neon sign she invented because the real sign said Scientific American and she thought her husband’s name looked better.
Most Nashvillians will go to the Frist. The Frist is fine. But the Van Vechten Gallery at Fisk is a room that Georgia O’Keeffe filled with modern masterpieces and gave to a Black university in the South in 1949 because a photographer and a sociologist who’d been friends since the Harlem Renaissance asked her to. It is one of the most remarkable gifts in the history of American art, and it is open to the public, and it is on a hill ten minutes from Broadway, and almost nobody goes.
They should.
Photo: Georgia O'Keeffe / Public Domain