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OLD SAYBROOK, Conn. — Elizabeth Tashjian has spent most of her 89 years trying to prove that nuts are at the very core of human existence. 

For her stand, some have called her nutty. But her work is being taken very seriously by some in the arts community. 

In the Nut Museum she created in her home in Old Lyme, she displays paintings, sculptures and masks based on the shelled snack. She sees art in walnuts, in peanuts, in coconuts. She believes there are souls under the shells of Brazilian nuts and pecans. And she’s likely to belt out a song over pine nuts, chestnuts and hazelnuts. 

“I use the nut form to inspire my artwork and thinking philosophy,” Tashjian said in an interview at the nursing home where she now lives. “I don’t want my museum to be taken as a joke.” 

It’s not. Connecticut College recently took over her collection, which it plans to develop into a traveling exhibit and a book about her art. 

The collection includes metal sculptures, a 35-pound coco de mer, nut masks, paintings and nuts themselves. There are also video clips from her four appearances on NBC’s “Tonight Show” with Johnny Carson, and many newspaper clippings telling stories about the offbeat museum. 

The college inquired about the collection when Christopher Steiner, director of college’s Department of Museum Studies, saw that Tashjian’s house was up for sale. 

Tashjian fell ill in late May, and police found her unconscious in her home. She awoke from a coma 28 days later and was transferred to a nursing home. The court appointed emergency conservators to handle her personal affairs, because she has no surviving family. They say Tashjian is too ill to care for herself, or her home. 

It’s a decision she contested. Tashjian appeared at a recent court hearing, and to everyone’s surprise, defended her sanity and declared she wanted to go home. 

“I’m as sane as anyone in this room,” she said. “I negate everything that’s been done here because it was based on the assumption I did not have my sanity. My sanity is intact.” 

The Gothic, tree-shrouded house was put up for sale to pay off her medical bills, said John Watts, her conservator. Tashjian never worked, has no social security and owes $330,000 on a mortgage. The house is listed at $695,000. 

Assessors found no monetary value in the nut collection. 

Steiner, however, saw a different kind of value — and was compelled to save it. 

“It’s almost a philosophy that she was trying to develop using the nut as a starting point,” said Steiner, who for years has used the museum as an example in his course Introduction to Museum Studies. “She was trying to say even the smallest everyday object can be beautiful if looked at correctly.” 

Jeff Andersen, director of the Florence Griswold Museum in Old Lyme, wrote a letter to the Probate Court in support of Steiner’s request for the collection. Florence Griswold’s documents and personal items were auctioned off when the house was sold years ago, and the museum has spent decades trying to reclaim them. 

He didn’t want to see Tashjian’s collection suffer the same fate. 

“It’s kind of a quandary about just how you value something like this,” Andersen said. “I would say there are other values — cultural value, artistic value.” 

In his quest to put together an exhibit, Steiner has been piecing together Tashjian’s life, leafing through diaries, fan mail and her art. Her parents divorced when she was seven, and she and her mother came to Old Lyme in 1950. Her mother died in 1959, and left the house to her. 

Tashjian opened her Nut Museum in 1972. 

She claims she didn’t realize the word “nut” could also mean crazy until a man visiting the museum didn’t have the required admission — $3 and a nut — so he offered his wife instead. 

“I was so surprised. I was astonished. I was shocked,” Tashjian said. “I almost closed the museum.” 

Instead, she says, she became a champion of nuts — a crusader aimed to rid the word nut of its double meaning. She would educate visitors on different kinds of nuts. Then she would try on masks that represented each nut, and quiz visitors on what they learned. 

“She was doing this 20 years ago, and museums weren’t doing that kind of interactive education,” Steiner said. “She was really ahead of her time in that sense.” 

Steiner said it will take two to three years to get the contents of the museum organized and arranged for an exhibit. In the meantime, Tashjian, steadily recovering from her medical bout, has another plan. 

“I want to build a nut theme park,” she says, smiling. “One that will put Disneyland to shame.”