Atlanta Artist Corey Barksdale at Age 17 Interview WSMV TN

1989 television interview of Corey Barksdale at age 17 by WSMV Nashville newscaster. The interview features Corey as a up and coming African-American artist carrying on the tradition of great African-American artist from the Harlem Renaissance era. The tradition of artist such as Aaron Douglas, Palmer Hayden, William H. Johnson, Lois Mailou Jones, Jacob Lawrence, Archibald Motley Jr., etc. Nashville connection to Harlem Renaissance:Aaron Douglas, Fisk University, Carl Van Vechten Gallery. When he died in 1946, Alfred Stieglitz, the great photographer and tireless promoter of modern art, left his estate to his wife, the painter Georgia O'Keeffe. His work as a photographer she shrewdly distributed to the large American museums that could be counted on to secure his reputation. But a sizable part of his art collection O'Keeffe deposited in a less predictable place. At the urging of a friend, the Harlem Renaissance writer Carl Van Vechten, she gave 97 works to Fisk University, the historically black school in Nashville. And she threw in a few of her own. One of those was Radiator Building-- Night, New York, 1927, a painting we now recognize as a key moment in her career. Related Articles Years passed, during which Fisk's endowment dwindled while the art market went into warp drive. In 2005 the school's president, Hazel O'Leary, came up with an idea that could not only pay to renovate the frayed campus gallery where the Stieglitz Collection has languished but also pump millions of dollars into Fisk's general budget. Why not sell off just a bit of that famous art? But when the school moved to bring Radiator Building to market, it triggered what became a lawsuit by the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, N.M., which moved to block the sale on the grounds that it violated the terms of the painter's bequest. In February the museum offered Fisk a deal. It could sell Radiator Building, but only to the museum, and for $7 million, a price much below what it would go for in the current art market. If Fisk said yes, the museum promised not to block the sale of another painting from the collection, a Marsden Hartley, on the open market. Fisk said yes. That was where things stood until April 5, when Tennessee attorney general Robert Cooper, whose office has the power to approve or disapprove charitable arrangements, rejected the arranged sale because of the difference between $7 million and what Fisk could get on the open market. Now lawyers for both sides plan to sit down in a judge's chambers to see if a new deal can be worked out. Eventually, Fisk fully expects to be taking something to market. Money has always been an obsession in the art world, but lately it's at the heart of constant disputes over "deaccessioning"--what museums and other institutions do when they liquidate part of their collections. Though as a practice deaccessioning is nothing new, the outlandishly overheated art market of recent years has made it newly irresistible. At a time when a Jackson Pollock or a Gustav Klimt can go for about $140 million, it's no surprise that one institution after another has begun to see its "permanent collection" as just so much movable merchandise. But art is no ordinary inventory. Briskly disposing of it doesn't always sit well with people who like to visit the art, to say nothing of the people who donate it and who like to suppose that their gifts won't be swept out the door a few years down the road.