The riverfront pair: River Shards, 2004, and Volatus Aquilae, 2005

2004 – 2005 · Beutter Park and the Riverwalk

River Shards: The new century's first additions stand on the river. In Beutter Riverfront Park — the reclaimed Ball Band ground whose course stands in Parks & River — stands River Shards, designed by Jan R. Martin and installed in 2004. The work is carried in the tourism record at that strength: the state tourism office's credited description names the sculpture "Shards" by Jan Martin at Beutter Park, and the park's visitor literature gives the fuller title and the 2004 installation. No Smithsonian inventory record for the work was reached — the national survey had closed before it was made — and its dimensions and medium are not printed here, because no source reached states them.

Volatus Aquilae: The following year the Riverwalk gained its eagle. Volatus Aquilae — the flight of the eagle — a steel eagle sixteen feet tall by Robert Kuntz Jr. of South Bend, was dedicated on a Friday in 2005, the South Bend Tribune's account describing the bird poised for flight over the rushing waters of the St. Joseph River, in what the paper called a wild place on the walk. The Tribune's headline named the dedication "the latest addition to Mishawaka's public art initiative" — the period's own phrase, printed as the paper's: by 2005 the city's scattered commissions had acquired, in the press's telling, the name of an initiative, though no ordinance or commission establishing one stands in the record reached.

Sources:

1. Indiana Office of Tourism Development, credited in Group Tour Magazine's Indiana public-art survey — "Shards" sculpture by Jan Martin, Beutter Park, Mishawaka; visitor literature for Robert C. Beutter Riverfront Park — the work as River Shards, designed by Jan R. Martin, installed 2004.
2. South Bend Tribune (2005), "The eagle has landed; Sculpture latest addition to Mishawaka's public art initiative" — Volatus Aquilae, by Robert Kuntz Jr. of South Bend, steel, sixteen feet, dedicated 2005 for the River Walk; the Tribune photograph by Greg Swiercz, as catalogued in the Michiana Memory newspaper record.