Showalter Fountain runs shallow with missing fish

A few days ago, Sherry Rouse was working when an official came in her office to tell her, “It had been found, it had been found!”

As the curator of campus art for the IU Office of Risk Management, Rouse immediately assumed the Showalter fish had been brought back. Instead, it was just a painting she had been missing.

“I had almost forgotten I lost it,” Rouse said. “After all the work you do to get something right, it’s just pretty depressing and heartbreaking to see it gone.”

On Aug. 1, the smallest of the bronze fish in the Showalter Fountain was poached.

The 400-pound statue was roughly separated from the base on which it once sat and hauled off. Officials are hoping the statue will turn up around campus, but more than two months have passed and the fish is still MIA. A bid for a new fish — an almost $10,000 fee to the University — has been proposed.

“I call it vandalism — it’s grand theft, and it ruins the sculpture,” Rouse said. “It costs the University a lot of money, and it is artistically unfortunate.”

The fish has been stolen twice before: once during the 1987 NCAA men’s basketball tournament and once when IU men’s basketball coach Bob Knight was fired. Whether the motives behind these disappearances have been celebratory or sorrowful is unknown. This past August, the vandals’ reasoning for stealing the fish is even less clear. 

“It could just be a trophy of sorts,” said IU Police Department Chief Keith Cash, who is also in charge of investigating the case.

Rouse had a different opinion.

“Some think they would try to sell it for scrap,” she said. “Or maybe they just thought it was funny.”

Regardless, the missing statue has been reported to the International Foundation of Art Research. If the vandals try to sell this statue, merchants will be notified that it is stolen.

“The thought is if we can think up a way to make it more difficult, people will not want to steal it,” Rouse said.

In 1987, the stolen statue was recovered. The second time the statue went missing, a new fish had to be cast and placed in the fountain in August 2009. Now — the third time — it looks like the University will have to pay for another replacement.

“All the others are originals. This is the only one remade,” Rouse said.

Cash did not comment on the preventative measures needed. He said he believes disclosing information about future surveillance efforts around the Showalter Fountain would hinder IUPD’s present enforcement.

Rouse said she hopes that with a new statue will come new preventative measures. She believes that a video camera outside the fountain might alert officials but wouldn’t stop anything. The real answer, Rouse believes, lies in the statues themselves.

There’s a room underneath the fountain where the plumbing comes through, Rouse said. If developers extend the base of these statues to this room, students could not unscrew the statues as easily, she said. This extra effort required on the burglars’ part might decrease the theft of the fish.