Rising Up: Rocky and the Making of Monuments
Featuring works from antiquity to today, the exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art explores the Rocky statue and its impact on the city’s culture, community, and public art.
In a moment of reckoning and reimagining for monuments, why do millions of people from around the world visit the Rocky statue by the steps at the Philadelphia Museum of Art?
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. More recently, artists including Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Glenn Ligon, Hank Willis Thomas, and Lisa Brice revisit this history through the lens of race, gender, and celebrity. These works aim to illuminate the underdog ideals visitors project onto the Rocky statue: perseverance, spirit, and grit — values shaped by the history of the sport and by lived struggle and aspiration.
Left: Larry Fink, “Blue Horizon, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, January 1990” (1990) (© Larry Fink/MUUS Collection); Right: Alex Webb, "Philadelphia, Rock Ministries Boxing Club" (2016)
Organized by guest curator Paul Farber, Director and Co-Founder of Monument Lab and host of the acclaimed NPR/WHYY podcast The Statue, Rising Up will showcase over 150 works by more than 50 artists and offer an art history of the Rocky statue, unpacking how this movie prop ultimately turned into a public art piece and site of global pilgrimage. The accompanying publication, edited by Farber, includes contributions from celebrated Philadelphia artist Alex Da Corte, former Philadelphia Eagle and Super Bowl champion Malcolm Jenkins, and noted film critic Carrie Rickey.
The museum offers Pay What You Wish admission every Friday night after 5 pm (ET).
For more information, visit philamuseum.org.
