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Iwo Jima Sculpture, Model for Marine War Memorial, Is Losing Its Home on Floating Museum

A 62-year-old sculpture of the flag-raising on Iwo Jima is getting the heave-ho from the museum on the aircraft carrier Intrepid while the ship is docked in Staten Island for an overhaul, museum officials and the sculpture’s owner said yesterday.

The five-ton sculpture, which served as a model for the United States Marine Corps War Memorial in Arlington, Va., has been on display at the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum since 1995. But museum officials, who are starting to renovate the ship’s interior, said they declined to buy the sculpture from its owner, Rodney Hilton Brown, and asked him to remove it from the ship by September.

Mr. Brown, a Manhattan mortgage banker who acquired the sculpture from its creator, Felix de Weldon, is now searching for another museum that will make space for the piece, which is 16 feet long and, with its flag, 20 feet high.
Read entire article at NYT