The gallery is named for Carl Van Vechten (1880 Cedar Rapids, Iowa-1964), a photographer; novelist; art, music and dance critic; biographer; philanthropist; and cultural entrepreneur from the 1920s to the 1960s. Carl Van Vechten was a friend of Fisk President, Dr. Charles Sturgeon Johnson and served as chairman of Fisk’s Fine Arts Commission in the 1940s to 1950s. He was instrumental in orchestrating the gift of the Alfred Stieglitz Collection to Fisk University from Georgia O’Keeffe.

The Carl Van Vechten Gallery is a neo-Romanesque structure built in 1888 as a church. The building served as the University Gymnasium—the first gymnasium on the campus of any black campus—from 1903 to 1949. It was converted to house the Alfred Stieglitz Collection and became the first permanent gallery space at Fisk University. The Carl Van Vechten Gallery of Fine Art opened on November 4, 1949. The Gallery’s ground floor level was used as studio space for art students and faculty and as the sculpture studio during the 1960s and 1970s. In the early 1980s, the building was renovated once again and the ground floor level was renovated and finished as an exhibition gallery named Gallery 1, and the building was rededicated on July 2, 1984. Today Gallery 1 features a rotating schedule of traveling exhibitions and temporary exhibitions organized by the University Galleries’ staff. Gallery 2 houses the permanent exhibit of the Alfred Stieglitz Collection of Modern Art.