About The Awakening
A giant appears to be trapped beneath the waterfront at National Harbor. His mouth is open, one hand stretches toward the sky, a knee rises from the sand, and other enormous body parts break through the surface at impossible distances from one another. The effect is not a statue standing on a pedestal. It looks like something underneath Maryland is trying very hard to escape.
The sculpture is The Awakening, created by J. Seward Johnson Jr. It consists of five separate cast-aluminum pieces arranged to create the illusion of a single buried figure. National Harbor describes the installation as 72 feet long, large enough that visitors can walk among the limbs instead of merely looking at them from a distance.
The sculpture originally became familiar to Washington-area visitors at Hains Point in Washington, D.C. When it was offered for sale, National Harbor developer Milt Peterson purchased it and moved it to the Maryland waterfront. The relocation changed the surroundings but preserved the central illusion: a distressed giant frozen at the exact moment he seems ready to tear free from the earth.
The Awakening is outdoors and integrated into a public sandy area at the Potomac waterfront. It has also required periodic restoration because people, weather, and waterfront conditions are hard on a sculpture designed to be approached closely. Few pieces of public art commit this aggressively to a single visual gag. Maryland did not install a statue of a giant. It installed only the parts that managed to get above ground.