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After standing outside of the Philadelphia Museum of Art for 20 years, the statue of Sylvester Stallone as Rocky Balboa, the undisputed most famous fictional Philadelphian, has finally been invited into the building it has cast a shadow over since 1981.
Given the rocky — sorry, bumpy — relationship between the two since the statue first arrived, many never thought this line of acceptance would ever be crossed, including those who extended the invitation.
“Never in a million years did I think that this statue was going to be inside the museum. And I think a lot of other people agree with me,” said Louis Marchesano, the museum’s deputy director of curatorial affairs and conservation.
The Rocky statue is not coming to just gaze upon all the works that critics have deemed more worthy of artistic consideration, including Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain.” It’s the main component of the “Rising Up: Rocky and the Making of Monuments” exhibition, running from April 25 to Aug. 2.
So what can a sculpture that started out as a movie prop for “Rocky III” tell us about our perceptions of public monuments? Quite a lot, says Paul Farber, director and co-founder of Monument Lab and the exhibition’s guest curator — particularly about ourselves.
“One of my hopes is that the museum and the statue not only see each other, but all of the people who have made meaning within and across those public spaces, receive spotlight and love,” Farber said. “I’m very interested in the statue, but I’m even more interested in the people. People who line up for the statue to take a picture with it. People who have engagement and critiques of it. People who shine a light on other boxers or other monumental figures.”
‘You have to give Schomberg his due’
Stallone obviously intended the statue to live on as more than a movie prop when he commissioned artist A. Thomas Schomberg to cast it in bronze — along with two others versions of the statue currently residing at the top of the museum steps and in Philadelphia International Airport.
Marchesano argues that the debate over whether the piece is art or not is no longer relevant, especially given its popularity today.
“Whatever you think about the statue one way or the other in terms of its quality, in terms of whether or not it’s a work of art, whatever you think about that, you have to give Schomberg his due,” he said. “He succeeded beyond, I think, even his wildest imagination, that four million people a year, many of whom have never seen a Rocky movie and who don’t know who Sylvester Stallone is, visit that statue.”
Farber explored how the statue transformed from a nuisance leftover from filming into a top tourist attraction for the city in WHYY’s “The Statue” podcast, which Marchesano credits with changing the museum’s “fraught relationship” with Rocky.
In the podcast, Farber recalled how his mother shamed him into paying attention to the statue, and Marchesano said the podcast had a similar effect on him and others in the museum.
“I’ve been here since 2019 and I saw those lines every single day, no matter the weather,” he said. “And it got me to think in the same way — Paul’s mother indirectly shamed us — into asking the same question: Why do so many people visit that?”
That’s the central question of the exhibition, and all of the accompanying galleries in the show are an attempt to answer that question through artworks, artifacts and stories.
“The Rocky statue is part of the show, but even when you’ll walk through it, you’re going to go through thousands of years of history of monuments told through the framework of boxing locally, nationally, internationally across time,” Farber said.
Working with the lab’s definition of monuments as “statements of power and presence in public,” the exhibition’s works range from around 400 BCE to Mural Arts works currently up today. Farber said that the depictions range from “celebrated figure, a social outcast, and underdog in the most fundamental senses, and occupies a really important advantage on power and humanity.”
Pieces range from statues, poems and photos to promotional posters, magazine covers and even the Steadicam test footage that Garrett Brown took of his wife running up the museum steps before he recorded Stallone’s now-iconic scene in the first Rocky movie.
Along with depictions of Stallone, real boxers like Joe Louis, Muhammad Ali and Elizabeth “Pink Panther” Monge are highlighted. Philly boxers and locations like Bernard Hopkins, Joe Louis and the Blue Horizon gym — their legacies often overshadowed by Rocky — are highlighted.
Marchesano said that the statue was intentionally not the first thing people see. Instead, they first encounter the earliest depictions of the sport, then its cultural heyday and blending into popular culture in the 1970s, and next its power and place in Philadelphia. All the while, museum-goers gradually get greater sightlines of the Rocky statue.
After guests encounter the Rocky statue, they approach contemporary works that portray boxing and its metaphors in different perspectives. One of these is “Resilience of the 20%,” a bronze casting of a clay block after Canadian performance artist Cassils “fought” it, in a statement on the resilience of queer communities under the prevalent violence they face.
The exhibition includes a map of Philly’s iconic boxing locations, with the ability to adjust for when the statue of Joe Frazier moves from the South Philly Sports Complex to the spot where the Rocky Statue previously stood. Farber said that “Smokin’ Joe”, who actually did the museum step running and frozen meat punching that Rocky later emulated, is as much a protagonist of the exhibition as the Italian Stallion and he hopes the show inspires line for photos with Frazier’s statue and a revitalization of his North Philly gym.
Farber said that after bringing people inside the museum, the exhibition’s goal is to invite interest back to the outside world where these pieces exist and gain their meaning. This includes the museum — or Rocky’s — steps, a common protest sight for Philadelphians that Farber described as “our people’s pedestal.”
“What I’m really interested to learn throughout the show is not just how people engage the show from as many walks of life, but also how it speaks to what is already an incredibly vibrant and meaningful and layered public space right outside of the museum’s front door,” he said.
So, where does this rank among the most “Philly” exhibitions the museum has ever had? Marchesano felt that 2021’s “New Grit: Art & Philly Now” was the only one that rivals it. He also pointed out the irony that it can simultaneously be seen as Philly and not Philly.
“The universal values that are embedded in that statue, some of them you would absolutely see as Philadelphia, like struggle and grit,” he said, laughing. “But the way that the whole world comes to the statue … makes Philadelphia, in a way, kind of the center of the world, because of the Rocky statue.”
