updated 3:07 p.m. ET Sept. 15, 2005

NEW YORK - Ted Williams, decapitated and frozen in Arizona.

And sculptor Daniel Edwards, protesting the state of the late baseball great with what he calls “a little shrine to his head” — an exhibit at First Street Gallery.

“The fact is, he was decapitated and stored in the middle of Arizona — it’s an atrocious thing,” Edwards said about the cryogenic process that resulted in the Hall of Famer’s head being surgically removed and frozen at Scottsdale’s Alcor Life Extension Foundation. The rest of Williams’ body is stored in a separate tank there.

Alcor is preserving Williams and more than 60 other “patients” in hopes that medical science one day will be so advanced that they can be revived.

“They should free his remains,” said Edwards as he put finishing touches to his show, which opened last week and runs through Oct. 1. “I’m a huge fan of Ted Williams. When I was a kid, the first bat I got was a Ted Williams model.”

Edwards set up his show as a kind of sports collectibles exhibit, with a sculpture of Williams’ frozen head as the centerpiece. The sculptor said he never saw Williams’ actual head or a photograph of it; he worked off photographs of the living man to form a “faithful portrait” of him in his later years.

The bust of the Boston Red Sox great rests alone in a glass case, his head leaning back, eyes partly closed.

The exhibit includes three copies of the sculpture, each in a glass case surrounded by memorabilia such as a 1954 Life magazine cover featuring Williams.

Alcor said in a statement that the company had nothing to do with the work of the 40-year-old artist, who specializes in sculpted portraits of great Americans. Alcor CEO Joe Waynick said it was “unfortunate that anyone feels they have to capitalize on the memory of Ted Williams for monetary gain.”

Edwards is offering the Williams busts for $10,000 to $15,000 each.

He said he was “shocked” when, about a year after Williams’ death in July 2002, he read in Sports Illustrated that Williams’ remains had been frozen in liquid hydrogen at the Arizona lab.

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The only publicly known documentation suggesting that Williams wanted to be cryogenically preserved was a piece of scrap paper, stained with motor oil and dated Nov. 2, 2000, according to Sports Illustrated. That paper states that Williams’ son, John Henry Williams, his sister, Claudia Williams, and their father desired to be put in “Bio-Stasis after we die” on the chance they might be “together in the future.”

Williams’ other daughter, Bobby-Jo Ferrell, filed a lawsuit contesting her half-brother’s decision to freeze their father’s remains. In his 1996 will, Williams said he wanted to be cremated and have his ashes scattered over his old fishing grounds in the Florida Keys.

Ferrell later dropped the suit against John Henry Williams, who died last year at 35. His body also is frozen at Alcor.

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