The Princess as a statue: Sufi Ahmad, 1987

1987 · bronze · City Hall

The object: The Princess Mishawaka monument record has two objects, and this section keeps them apart. The 1932 object is the Lincoln Park boulder and tablet, carried above. The second object is a statue: Princess Mishawaka, a bronze by the sculptor Sufi Ahmad, dated 1987, recorded by the Smithsonian's Save Outdoor Sculpture Indiana survey of 1993 at City Hall, owned by the City of Mishawaka. The legend the statue embodies stands dispelled in Folklore and is not retold here; the marker course stands in Heritage. What stands here is the statue as a work of public art: in 1987 the city acquired, for its seat of government, a bronze of its fictional namesake — the legend's third civic life, after the 1875 book and the 1932 bronze tablet, and the first in the round.

A caution in the secondary record, printed rather than smoothed: The county public-art list that republishes the Smithsonian survey gives this statue's dimensions as approximately five by nine by five feet — figures identical, to the inch, to those it gives the Christopher Columbus of 1992 in the entry above it, a duplication that marks the dimensions line as a copying error somewhere in the chain. The dimensions are therefore not printed as fact here; the survey's own facts — sculptor, date, material, owner, City Hall location — stand. Where the statue stands tonight is a separate question: City Hall has moved since 1993, and no source reached records the statue's present placement. The gap is named in this section's notes, with the city's own facilities record as the settling source.

Sources:

1. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Art Inventories Catalog (SIRIS) — "Princess Mishawaka, (sculpture)," Save Outdoor Sculpture, Indiana Survey (1993): Sufi Ahmad, sculptor; 1987; bronze; City Hall; owner City of Mishawaka.
2. "List of public art in St. Joseph County, Indiana" — the SIRIS-derived county list, cited here for the dimensions duplication discussed in the text; its Mishawaka entries are used throughout this section only where the underlying survey record supports them.