Popular D.C. Sculpture to be Moved to Md.

WASHINGTON - A sculpture that has drawn thousands of visitors to a riverfront park near the National Mall for 27 years has been sold to a private developer and will be dug up and moved to the National Harbor in suburban Maryland.

J. Seward Johnson's The Awakening, a 70-foot cast aluminum sculpture in five pieces, depicts a giant breaking free from the earth at the tip of Hains Point. It has rested there on National Park Service land since a 1980 citywide public art exhibition. The artist donated the work to The Sculpture Foundation, a nonprofit arts group in Santa Monica, Calif., in 2000.

Since then it has been on loan to the park service while the foundation sought a buyer. The park service remained as its caretaker and never expected to keep the sculpture permanently, spokesman Bill Line said.

Developer Milt Peterson purchased The Awakening from the foundation last year for $725,000. The sale was announced Sunday.

Now the giant, nicknamed Charlie, will be dug up over the coming months to be restored and put on public display as the centerpiece of a beach being constructed on the Potomac River in Prince George's County, Md., by April 2008. The beach will lead to a plaza with other works of art and an entertainment space near the harbor's grouping of restaurants, stores and hotels, Peterson said.

"We're keeping it on the Potomac as public art," Peterson said. "Washington has very few public spaces on the water, so we want to be Washington's waterfront."

He said the art "sets the right tone" for the creation of a small new city on the river near the nation's capital. Peterson is considering adding other sculptures of historic and patriotic figures, such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and a pair of bald eagles overlooking the harbor.

"We've had several inquiries. This one was the good one," Helen Fitzgerald, associate curator of The Sculpture Foundation said of the sale. "We were very reassured by the accessibility to the general public in the new location."

No admission fees are planned for visitors to the National Harbor's sculpture area, but the development will charge for parking, Peterson said.

(Copyright 2007 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)