Wellstone's Legacy Nears Fruition

Guest said silkscreen prints of the painting may eventually be available.

. . . and Sculptures

Keep your eyes and ears open walking through the Capitol late in the evenings these days. If you're not careful, you might be run over by a 1,000-pound statue roaming the hallways.

In preparation for the planned December opening of the Capitol Visitors Center, officials are moving two dozen of the mostly marble statues that line the Capitol's hallways into the new underground greeting center for tourists. The acting Architect of the Capitol, Stephen T. Ayers, is overseeing the moves, which are incredibly labor-intensive.

Monday night, for example, more than half a dozen workers gathered in the second-floor hallway just off the Senate floor to lay down wood planks across the Capitol. Using a large hydraulic lift system, they picked up a likeness of John Middleton Clayton-- a 19th-century senator from Delaware -- and slid it across the Capitol, out the doors and into the visitors center.

Eva Malecki, the architect's spokesman, said the decision on which statues go into the visitors center depends on how recently they were added to the Capitol's collection and which ones reflect "the diversity of the collection and the diversity of the country."

For example, Po'pay-- a 17th-century Pueblo freedom fighter in what became New Mexico -- is the most recent addition, in 2005. It was recently hauled from the Capitol's site of highest honor, the Rotunda, where Jefferson, Washington, Eisenhower and Martin Luther King Jr. are on display, to the visitors center.

In the end, there will be more room inside the Capitol, with 76 statues there and 24 in the visitors center. The next addition, a statue of Helen Keller, soon to be sent up from her native Alabama, will go to the visitors center, Malecki said.