The Teaching Line: Who Taught Art Here

The checklist's teaching succession has a named hinge — the teacher whose bequest founded the museum — and she is findable, across the river: Carlotta Banta, a South Bend teacher, whose will conceived the South Bend Museum of Art. The form prints at county size because Mishawaka's own museum was a schoolteacher's town project of the Hannah Lindahl kind, told in the museums section, rather than a bequest. Mishawaka's teaching line at record size runs through two institutions. In the public schools, art teaching is a century of named-in-yearbooks instructors whose succession no one has printed: the line exists, in the schools' record, and its park-by-park equivalent for art — a dated roster of the high school's and the junior highs' art teachers — stands in the yearbooks at the public library, the named settler for the succession at full size. At Bethel University the line has a present name and a building: the art department in the Everest-Rohrer center, chaired in the current record by Chad Jay, painter, who directs the Weaver Gallery and whose Via Crucis cycle of fifteen mixed-media stations filled it in the spring of 2025 — the teacher as exhibiting artist, the form the small-college line takes. The entry thus prints the succession as the record holds it: one bequest-founding teacher at the county's museum, one named college chair in the city's, and the school line awaiting its yearbooks.