The South Bend Museum of Art: a schoolteacher's bequest

1947 – present · founded as the South Bend Art Center

The founding: The city's museum began as a kindergarten teacher's idea of what a city owes its children. Carlotta Banta taught at Perley School for thirty-five years and left her life savings to found an art center for the community — a place, in the words the museum preserves, where beautiful pictures would hang and where little children would come to look and to adorn the galleries with their own precious living images. Her bequest founded the South Bend Art Center in 1947, housed first in the carriage house at Copshaholm, the Oliver mansion. In March 1948 Mr. and Mrs. E. M. Morris sponsored the Indiana Room, a gallery reserved for Hoosier artists, and donated the collection's first six artworks, in their words, to encourage the art and artists of Indiana. Harold Zisla directed the center from 1957 to 1966, and his name is on the museum's money still: its acquisitions are supported by the Zisla Acquisition Fund.

Century Center: In 1977 the museum moved into Century Center at the building's opening, into a specially designed space on three levels of the north wing of Philip Johnson and John Burgee's convention center on the riverfront. Renamed along the way — city documents of the 1990s know it as the South Bend Regional Museum of Art — it carries today the name South Bend Museum of Art. The Carmichael Gallery shows the permanent collection, now more than 1,200 works of American art from the nineteenth century to the present, from the Hoosier Group impressionists to living Midwestern artists; five galleries run more than fifteen exhibitions a year, among them the Scholastic Art Awards, the museum's Biennial and the Around the Bend open shows; its studios enroll about a thousand students a year, and its ceramics studio is described as the largest and most professional in northern Indiana. The museum has been accredited by the American Alliance of Museums since 1987, renewed in 1999 and 2011, and admission is free.

The present horizon, November 2026: On August 27, 2026, the Civic Center Board of Managers voted unanimously to end the museum's lease at Century Center, giving it thirty-six months to plan its next steps; the city's Downtown South Bend 2045 Plan, unveiled in February 2025, contemplates relocating the museum and demolishing Century Center's north wing. The museum's executive director, Lisa Shaffer, told the board it draws 16,000 to 21,000 visitors a year and called the move a once-in-a-generation opportunity, in the museum's eightieth year — it turns eighty in 2027. In July 2026 the Lilly Endowment awarded the museum one million dollars for governance, development, data systems and a review of its collection.

Sources:

1. South Bend Museum of Art, "About" and "Becoming SBMA" (southbendart.org) — the Banta bequest and her words, the 1947 founding, the March 1948 Indiana Room and the Morris gift of the first six works, the 1977 Century Center move, the accreditation dates, the Carmichael Gallery and collection, and the Zisla Acquisition Fund.
2. South Bend Tribune, "South Bend Museum of Art tackles major move from Century Center" (August 27, 2026) — the unanimous lease vote and thirty-six-month timeline, the Downtown South Bend 2045 Plan, the visitor and enrollment figures, the Lilly Endowment award, and Executive Director Lisa Shaffer.
3. City of South Bend, Redevelopment Commission minutes (1993–94) — the institution's name in that period, the South Bend Regional Museum of Art, and its then director, Susan Visser.