The motherhouse ground: devotional sculpture on Dragoon Trail

1944 and undated · the Sisters of St. Francis of Perpetual Adoration

The convent's outdoor works: The Smithsonian's Save Outdoor Sculpture survey of 1994 recorded two sculptural ensembles on the ground of the Sisters of St. Francis of Perpetual Adoration — the motherhouse whose founding and course stand in Religion. The first is dated: a Stations of the Cross and Calvary scene of 1944, fourteen stations in marble, paint, limestone and concrete, each station about twenty-eight by twenty-two by eleven inches on its base, with a crucifixion scene of about sixteen feet. The second is the Our Lady of Lourdes Grotto — limestone, paint and ceramic-coated metal, its Virgin about six feet and its Bernadette about three, inside a grotto the survey measured at some sixty-five by twenty by fifteen feet; the survey gives it no date, and none is printed here. The makers of both works are unrecorded in the survey — "Unknown" is the inventory's own word, carried as such.

Their place in the ledger: These are devotional works on a congregation's own ground, semi-public in the way of shrine grounds — recorded by the national inventory as outdoor sculpture, owned by the sisters, and carried here because the inventory carries them. They are, on the dates the record gives, the city's only documented sculptural ensembles between the 1932 boulder and the bronzes of 1987: the middle of Mishawaka's public-art century belongs, in the surviving record, to a convent garden.

Sources:

1. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Art Inventories Catalog (SIRIS) — "Stations of the Cross and Calvary Scene, (sculpture)," Save Outdoor Sculpture, Indiana Survey (1994): 1944, fourteen stations, materials and dimensions as printed, artist unknown, owner the Sisters of St. Francis of Perpetual Adoration.
2. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Art Inventories Catalog (SIRIS) — "Our Lady of Lourdes Grotto, (sculpture)," Save Outdoor Sculpture, Indiana Survey (1994): materials and dimensions as printed, no date given, artist unknown.
3. This build's Religion section — the motherhouse and the congregation's course, cross-referenced.