The Immigrants: Kathryn Field, 1993

Dedicated 12 September 1993 · painted steel · Gateway Park, Main Street

The work: The strongest-documented artwork in this section is a silhouette in painted steel. The Immigrants, by the sculptor Kathryn Field, stands in Gateway Park on Main Street, administered by the city's Parks and Recreation Department. The Smithsonian's inventory describes it exactly: two silhouetted figure groups set about thirty feet apart — the first an immigrant family of five fragmented figures, caught as if in motion, standing amidst a series of flagpoles, rising some twenty-five feet; the second an elderly woman seated on a bench, hands crossed in her lap, a young girl beside her with her right hand over the woman's left, the group some fifteen feet. The work is signed and dated on its fabric — "K Field 93" — with a bronze plaque in the base under the bench carrying the names of the major donors. It was dedicated on 12 September 1993.

Made in Mishawaka, of Mishawaka's subject: The work's fabrication is part of its record: the inventory names Max Feitz and the Mishawaka Steel Fabricating Company as its fabricators — a Mishawaka sculpture, of the immigrant families who built Mishawaka, cut and welded by a Mishawaka shop. The subject is the city's own founding demography, the Belgian, German, Italian and Polish arrivals carried as communities in Neighborhoods and Culture; the sculpture is where that record stands in steel at the city's gateway. Of the works in this ledger, it is the one the national inventory documented at full strength — sculptor, fabricator, date, dedication, donors, dimensions — and it is printed at that strength here.

Sources:

1. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Art Inventories Catalog — "The Immigrants, (sculpture)," control number IAS IN000913: Kathryn Field, sculptor; Max Feitz and Mishawaka Steel Fabricating Company, fabricators; painted steel; dedicated September 12, 1993; Gateway Park, Main Street; administered by the City of Mishawaka Parks and Recreation Department; the signature and donor plaque as described; South Bend Tribune, September 1, 1993, cited in the record.