South Bend Artists: The Fine-Art Record of the Bend

Artists · the fine-art record of the Bend

South Bend's art was made in two places at once. At the north edge of the city, a university hired its artists the way it hired its priests — from Rome, from Zagreb, from the Vatican itself — and built them studios, so that the campus became a sculpture garden by accretion: a Bolognese muralist's seventeen-year program of frescoes, a Croatian master's last studio, an eighteen-foot Moses raised by his student. In the city below, art ran on a schoolteacher's bequest: Carlotta Banta left her life savings so that beautiful pictures would hang where children could see them, and the art center she founded in 1947 grew into the city's museum. Between those poles the record holds the city's own painters — George Ames Aldrich, the impressionist of the 1920s art scene, and Harold Zisla, the factory designer who ran the art center, founded a university art department, and turned abstract in his fifties — and its public sculpture, from the 1903 Soldiers and Sailors Monument at the courthouse to the thirty-two feet of painted steel standing in the St. Joseph River since 1980. The earliest paintings in the record are the History Museum's portraits of the Potawatomi leaders Leopold Pokagon and Topinabee, credited to an artist named Van Sanden, which the museum describes as the only known paintings of the two men; the painter's full identity is not given in the museum's published account, and the gap stands here rather than under an invented name. Every entry below states its subject's tie to this ground exactly — born here, raised here, formed here, or brought here to work — and the work from the museum and catalogue record where that record exists.