New US exhibition explores power of monuments – with help from Rocky

A statue of Sylvester Stallone’s fictional boxer Rocky Balboa is the focal point of an examination of the power of monuments opening at the Philadelphia Museum of Art this weekend that marks two millennia of boxing and celebrity.

The statue, placed on the “Rocky Steps” of the museum in 1982, six years after the the 1976 film Rocky made Stallone a star, is one of Philadelphia’s most popular tourist attractions, visited by an estimated 4 million people annually.

For many, including show curator Paul Farber, Rocky, who rises from a struggling Philadelphia club fighter and debt collector to “go the distance” with the heavyweight champion, offers a more personal story.

The show, Rising Up: Rocky and the Making of Monuments, is curated by Farber, co-founder of Monument Lab, a nonprofit Philadelphia public art organization “dedicated to advancing justice by re-imagining monuments as places for belonging, learning, and healing”.

After several years in which monuments and their meaning have been a source of political and cultural friction, Farber told ArtNews he had taken the Rocky statue for granted. That is, until he noticed the lines of people waiting to observe it and, inevitably, be photographed mimicking it.

“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.”

“It’s a cultural meeting ground,” 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.”

The exhibition comes as the Rocky franchise (there are six films, including the last, eponymous Rocky Balboa) celebrates its 50th anniversary. It aims, according to the museum, to answer the question of why, in a moment of reckoning and reimagining for monuments generally, “do millions of people from around the world visit the Rocky statue by the steps at the Philadelphia Museum of Art?”

The answer it offers is that fighters have been shaped into public figures for millennia. To make its case, the exhibition draws on ancient sculptures, including the classic Hellenistic Seated Boxer, 19th century European works of art, images from boxing’s golden age in the US – including Jack Johnson, who became the first Black world heavyweight boxing champion – and works by contemporary figures including Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Glenn Ligon.