Philadelphia Museum of Art Opens Rocky Exhibition Exploring Boxing, Celebrity, and the Meaning of Monuments

A new exhibition that opened this weekend at the Philadelphia Museum of Art puts one of the city’s most recognizable landmarks at the center of a broader conversation about public memory, celebrity, and endurance: the bronze statue of Rocky Balboa.Titled “Rising Up: Rocky and the Making of Monuments,” the show examines how a fictional boxer from a Hollywood film became a global symbol and one of Philadelphia’s most visited attractions. The exhibition spans roughly 2,000 years of boxing imagery and places the Rocky statue within a longer history of art, struggle, and public devotion.“‘Rising Up: Rocky and the Making of Monuments’ traces more than two millennia of artists’ engagement with boxing and celebrity. Ancient sculptures, nineteenth-century European works, and images from the golden age of boxing in the United States, together with contemporary art, reveal how fighters have been shaped as public figures,” the museum says on its website.Installed on the museum’s steps in 1982 during the production of “Rocky III,” the statue was originally created as a movie prop. Over time, however, it took on a life far beyond the franchise. Today, the figure draws an estimated 4 million visitors to the museum steps each year, according to the Philadelphia Visitor Center, with tourists routinely lining up to take photos and recreate Rocky’s famous victory pose.For guest curator Paul Farber, the scale of that fascination became impossible to ignore.“No matter what time of day or time of year, there’s a queue. I started to research it five years ago and found as many people visit the Rocky statue as visit the Statue of Liberty – more than visit the Liberty Bell here in Philly,” he told Art News.“It’s a cultural meeting ground,” Mr. Farber told the outlet. “It’s a site of global pilgrimage for people finding a way through pain and difficulty. He’s the patron saint of the underdog. But it bears mentioning that the most mythical Philadelphian is a white boxer who never lived, while there are many Black Philadelphia boxers who were and are major members of their community.”Mr. Farber, co-founder of Monument Lab, has spent years studying how monuments shape public identity and civic memory. His new exhibition arrives after several years of national debate over the role of monuments in public life and asks why, in this moment of rethinking public symbols, Rocky still commands such widespread devotion.According to the museum, the exhibition seeks to answer a central question: why do millions of people from around the world visit the Rocky statue outside the Philadelphia Museum of Art?Its response is rooted in the long history of boxing as spectacle and storytelling. The show includes ancient works such as the “Hellenistic Seated Boxer,” 19th-century European art, imagery from boxing’s golden age in the United States, and works by artists including Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Glenn Ligon. At the center of the exhibition is the bronze Rocky statue itself.“These works illuminate what visitors project onto the Rocky statue: ideals of the underdog—perseverance, spirit, and grit—values shaped by the history of the sport and by lived struggle and aspiration,” the museum said.The museum’s relationship with that statue has not always been smooth. After filming ended, museum officials pushed to remove it from the steps. The sculpture was later relocated to South Philadelphia before returning to the base of the steps in 2006. Even then, it remained something of an uneasy fit.“We had a very fraught relationship with a statue that started off as a movie prop,” Louis Marchesano, the museum’s deputy director of curatorial affairs and conservation, told the New York Times last week. “And we fought really hard at one point to have it removed.”Marchesano said the institution has gradually come to recognize what the statue means to the public.“The museum has had — and I hate to say this, no pun intended — a rocky relationship with the statue,” Mr. Marchesano said. “It took us decades to come to terms with it, but I’m glad that we did.”When the exhibition closes in August, the Rocky statue displayed inside the museum will move to a permanent location at the top of the museum’s steps, a placement it has never officially held before. The statue currently outside remains on loan from Stallone.Its longtime location at the bottom of the steps will not stay empty. A statue of Joe Frazier is set to replace it.

Philadelphia Museum of Art Opens Rocky Exhibition Exploring Boxing, Celebrity, and the Meaning of Monuments

Philadelphia Museum of Art Opens Rocky Exhibition Exploring Boxing, Celebrity, and the Meaning of Monuments

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