One of the Showalter Fountain’s missing fish has been recovered years after it was stolen, but how it was snatched remains a mystery.
The fish — which curators say is actually a stylized dolphin — is pockmarked, scratched and stinking.
“If you get close enough to him, you can kind of smell, like, beer,” Assistant Curator of Campus Art Katie Chattin said. “It’s gross. Beer’s not good for bronze.”
The curators recovered the fish after an anonymous Bloomington native recognized a picture of it on a friend’s Instagram account. The photo was taken down immediately, but the man who’d recognized the fish managed to track it down.
“Eventually, somebody else moved the fish and let him have it and bring it back to me,” Curator of Campus Art Sherry Rouse said. “Then I just get a call from someone here in town saying ‘The fish is here, and you can come and get it.’”
Rouse said the person who recovered the fish wants anonymity “not because they’re guilty, but because they didn’t do it to get fame and fortune. They just did what they thought was right.”
But they still don’t know who took the fish.
“We don’t have any charges to press,” Rouse said. “We don’t have a thief.”
The curators aren’t sure exactly which stolen fish they just recovered.
They know it’s the smallest of the bronze fish. Because the 300-plus pound sculpture is the lightest of the fish, it’s long been a target of theft.
One disappeared on August 1, 2010, according to an Indiana Daily Student article from that year. That fish is a replica of the original, which was stolen after the Hoosiers took home a national basketball championship in 1987.
Rouse said she can’t be sure of the status of the original missing statue, but an IDS photo from 1987 shows workers carrying a fish wearing a white T-shirt away from the Eton Mews apartment complex in Bloomington.
Rouse said based on this information, she’s nearly positive that the fish that now sits in their storage facility is the most recent replica. But the statue has taken on an almost legendary quality, and she has trouble separating the true history from the lore.
“There’s something about these things that are kind of mythological,” Rouse said. “And they just kind of have a life of their own.”
Rouse remembers having to empty the water after it was dyed green on St. Patrick’s Day and fixing Venus’s patina when a duct-taped Christmas bra tore it off.
Campus Division Manager Mike Girvin said students have decorated the statue and added suds to the water. He’s pulled socks and underwear from the water in droves.
“We’ve had the lips painted red and red electrical tape put on there a couple times,” Girvin said.
Rouse said she knows there’s something about the statue that draws people in.
“I think that’s kind of the joy of the entire thing,” Rouse said. “It is sort of an Indiana University legend.”
The recovered fish is meant to sit directly in front of Venus on the fountain’s west side. Instead, it rests on a cart in a storage facility off 17th Street.
It is dented and dirty. Scratches in its dark brown patina coating reveal a layer of shinier bronze underneath. Yellowish glass shards coat its skin and have collected under his gills. There are mysterious blue paint splatters on both sides of its tail.
Pieces of the “Birth of Venus” are littered around the storage room. The working fish are laid out on the floor.
“We pulled those fish out for Big 10 Championships and NCAA,” Rouse said. “Just an ounce of prevention.”
Soon, they’ll be returned to the fountain. Pristine, they bear the original dark brown patina. Venus Bronze Works, a Detroit Company that created the statue stolen in 2010, offered to repair the returned one for free.
The recovered fish will be blasted with walnut shells to remove the outer layer of patina, and a new layer will be added on top. Rouse said it will take time to restore the statue, so it may not return until the next time they remove the others for cleaning or to protect them from theft.
Since the last fish disappeared in 2010, they’ve been equipped with sensors that alert police whenever they’re jostled.
“We just thought it was a good investment to try to protect the fish,” said Larry Stephens, director of IU’s Office of Insurance, Loss Control and Claims.
Stephens said he thinks the crime’s age would make it difficult to prosecute.
“It seemed the better of two choices to get our fish back and not worry about pressing charges,” Stephens said.
In the long run, Rouse said, it’s worth it just to have the dolphin back in Bloomington.
“Not that I wouldn’t want to get a hold of them personally and give them a piece of my mind,” Rouse said.
In the storage facility, Chattin looked at the fish and made a small sympathetic sound.
“If only he could talk, right?”
