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

A statue of Sylvester Stallone’s fictional boxer Rocky Balboa is the focus of an examination of the power of monuments that mark two millennia of boxing and fame, opening this weekend at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

The statue, which was installed in the museum’s “Rocky Steps” in 1982, six years after the 1976 film Rocky starred Stallone, is one of Philadelphia’s most popular tourist attractions and is visited by approximately 4 million people a year.

For many, including show curator Paul Farber, Rocky offers a more personal story, as he goes from tough Philadelphia club fighter and debt collector to “walking away” with the heavyweight champion.

The exhibition, 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 reimagining monuments as places of belonging, learning, and healing.”

After several years in which monuments and their meanings were a source of political and cultural friction, Farber he told ArtNews He accepted the Rocky statue as it was. Until he noticed the lines of people waiting to observe him and inevitably got photographed imitating him.

“No matter what time of day or time of year there is a line. I started researching five years ago and found that there are about as many people visiting the Rocky statue as there are visiting the Statue of Liberty, more people visiting the Liberty Bell here in Philly.”

“This is a cultural gathering place,” Farber told the outlet. “This is a global pilgrimage site for people who find a way through pain and hardship. He is the patron saint of the oppressed. However, it is worth noting that the most legendary Philadelphian is a white boxer who never lived, whereas there are many Black Philadelphia boxers who were and still are important members of their communities.”

The exhibition comes as the Rocky franchise (there are six films, including the last, the eponymous Rocky Balboa) celebrates its 50th anniversary. Why, according to the museum, are “millions of people from around the world visiting the Rocky statue on the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art?” at a moment when monuments in general are being reckoned with and re-imagined. It aims to answer the question.

The answer this offers is that warriors have been made into public figures for millennia. To prove its point, the exhibition includes antique sculptures including the classic Hellenistic Seated Boxer, 19th-century European artworks, images from boxing’s golden age in the United States (including Jack Johnson, the first Black world heavyweight boxing champion), and works by contemporary figures such as Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Glenn Ligon.

At its center is the bronze statue from the 1982 movie Rocky III.

“We had a very tense relationship with a sculpture that started as a movie prop,” said Louis Marchesano, the museum’s deputy director of curatorial affairs and conservation. New York Times last week. “And at one point we fought really hard to get it removed.”

Stallone himself also weighed in. leaves the curator a long voicemail thread, He explained that the steps of the museum looked “like another city, a magical space in an intellectual castle that I can only look at from a distance, like the Acropolis or an incredible monument.”

The steps, in their own way, will define who Rocky is, he added: “We’ve seen him in misery, we’ve seen him running on the cobblestones – wet, cold, damp, whatever. In the end, his escape from misery and poverty and his decision that what will mark the pinnacle of his success is running the steps of this magnificent structure where he is not beneath what is inside or what it represents.”

Stallone commissioned the bronze statue from Colorado sculptor A Thomas Schomberg, whose work is in many US museums. Curator Farber told ArtNews that even the artist wasn’t sure whether the Rocky statue was a work of art or a movie prop.

Farber told the press: “I spent a lot of time with the artist whose work is famous but this question bothered me.” “I spent time in his studio, looked at his process and understood other works he had done… They could have asked for Styrofoam support. But he worked with an artist who worked in bronze.”