{"id":188175,"date":"2026-05-09T18:04:12","date_gmt":"2026-05-09T18:04:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/188175\/"},"modified":"2026-05-09T18:04:12","modified_gmt":"2026-05-09T18:04:12","slug":"rocky-has-entered-the-building","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/188175\/","title":{"rendered":"Rocky Has Entered the Building"},"content":{"rendered":"

In 1931, Josephine Baker, wearing an evening gown, slipped into the corner of a Paris stage made up to resemble a boxing ring, knelt and began to sing<\/a> \u201cParee,\u201d<\/a> in honor of the city where she had moved, six years earlier. About a minute in, she raised her arms above her head, forming an exultant V. The audience, which included Marcel Duchamp, \u201cwent wild,\u201d the artist Alex Da Corte reports in a catalog essay for \u201cRising Up: Rocky and the Making of Monuments,\u201d<\/a> a captivating exhibition on view through Aug. 2 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.<\/p>\n

\u201cRising Up\u201d is, on its face, little more than a crowd-pleasing ode to the Rocky Balboa statue, an accidental civic monument that Sylvester Stallone commissioned in 1980 from the sculptor A. Thomas Schomberg<\/a> for the third \u201cRocky\u201d movie. The artwork outlived its movie-prop origins to become a magnet for tourists from around the world, a good percentage of whom pose for pictures with their arms raised \u2014 like Rocky\u2019s, and like Baker\u2019s \u2014 in triumph.<\/p>\n

An estimated four million people make that pilgrimage each year. That\u2019s twice as many as visit the Liberty Bell, and about five times as many as the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where the statue has been on display outside since 2006.<\/p>\n

Yet as the essay by Da Corte, a key contributor to the catalog, makes clear, the show\u2019s ambitions aim far beyond Rocky; it feels at home anywhere boxing and the wider culture (high or low) collide. Organized by the guest curator Paul M. Farber, co-founder of the nonprofit Monument Lab, \u201cRising Up\u201d is an astute rumination on race, political activism, violence and Philadelphia\u2019s own (depending on your point of view) fighting spirit or inferiority complex.<\/p>\n

In its investigations of the American self-image, the exhibition makes a surprisingly useful addition to the cultural events honoring the country\u2019s 250th birthday. And in its nuance, depth and moments of grace, it offers a timely counterpoint to the bombastic monument proposals lately pouring out of Washington.<\/p>\n

Among the questions it poses, without ever falling into the trap of taking itself too seriously, are these: Who gets to be memorialized in public space? Who gets to be an underdog? What does it mean that the leading modern symbol of Philadelphia is a fictional character \u2014 \u201cthe most famous Philadelphian to never live,\u201d as Farber puts it \u2014 while many of the city\u2019s real-life heroes, including the boxer Joe Frazier, have languished on the edge of the public spotlight?<\/p>\n

You may think, as I na\u00efvely did before seeing \u201cRising Up,\u201d that the cultural traffic between boxing and the art world is a bit thin, filled mostly with saccharine tributes to the sweet science \u2014 LeRoy Neiman knockoffs with heroic forms in garish colors. What Farber discovered in putting the show together, as he said during a recent onstage conversation at the museum, is that \u201calmost every artist I love has made a boxing piece.\u201d<\/p>\n

The 160 artworks and artifacts in the exhibition, about one-third from the Philadelphia Museum of Art\u2019s collections, include work by Carrie Mae Weems, Eadweard Muybridge, Andy Warhol, Rashid Johnson, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Kara Walker and Hank Willis Thomas. (And Neiman too, represented here, among other pieces, by a 1975 portrait of Frazier in a star-spangled robe with the words \u201cSmokin\u2019 Joe\u201d across the back.)<\/p>\n

The more you dig into the subject, the more you realize that boxing and art share much common ground. The overlap starts with a material connection: canvas, on which painters paint and boxers box. Boxing\u2019s emergence as a popular sport, hitting a peak in the 1920s, also happens to match the rise of modern art. Both glorified, for better and worse, the solitary heroic figure, typically male, doling out blows and taking on all comers. Muhammad Ali\u2019s braggadocio wasn\u2019t so different from Picasso\u2019s.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s plenty of bravado in \u201cRising Up,\u201d but you have to wait for it. The show begins in a quieter key, with modestly scaled treatments of boxers and boxing matches, from Greek and Etruscan examples to a Muybridge collotype to a stocky 1940 bust of Joe Louis, in bronze, by Ruth Yates.<\/p>\n

Then, as we move into the second half of the 20th century, the gallery proportions and the artworks themselves leap in scale, as if to make room for the outsize personalities \u2014 again, nearly all male, and nearly all self-made, or at least self-mythologizing \u2014 we are about to meet: Ali, Warhol, Basquiat, Keith Haring.<\/p>\n

Those figures are followed by a large gallery dedicated almost entirely to Frazier. Born in rural South Carolina in 1944, he moved to Philadelphia at age 15. He won a gold medal at 20 and a heavyweight title at 26. Sylvester Stallone, in his Rocky screenplay, borrowed many elements of his hero\u2019s story from Frazier\u2019s life, including a training regimen that mixed punching raw meat with running up and down the Philadelphia museum\u2019s broad limestone steps.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s only after \u201cRising Up\u201d has taken the time to give Frazier his due that we finally come upon the Rocky statue itself, appearing inside the museum for the first time. Three large versions of it, about 120 percent of life size, were made before Schomberg destroyed the mold. The one in the show has been moved from a spot at the bottom of the museum\u2019s grand outdoor staircase that will soon be occupied by a statue of Frazier. The second, now at the top of those steps, is owned by Stallone, who bought it at auction in 2017 for $403,657. The third is on view at Philadelphia International Airport (where Farber, true to the populist nature of the show, hopes to sell the excellent \u201cRising Up\u201d catalog).<\/p>\n

For years, the leaders of the museum, and other guardians of high culture in Philadelphia, scoffed at the idea that Schomberg\u2019s statute deserved a place inside the museum. (\u201cRocky\u201d got a similar treatment from film critics; in The New York Times, Vincent Canby called<\/a> it a \u201csentimental little slum movie.\u201d) And even if that attitude looks shortsighted in retrospect \u2014 why would any museum turn up its nose at one of the world\u2019s perfect machines for attracting crowds? \u2014 the statue does lose something by moving indoors.<\/p>\n

Outside, it occupies a truly public and communal space. It\u2019s accessible without a ticket. No guard will tell you not to touch it. The way the public engages with it creates a vibrant Philly spin on a miniature piazza, often thronged: Wait in line, step up, raise arms, step aside to make way for the next Rocky fan.<\/p>\n

Inside, without that ritual playing out in front of you, it\u2019s easier to focus on the statue\u2019s middling artistic quality, which isn\u2019t terribly surprising given the circumstances in which it was made.<\/p>\n

(You may also notice, with Rocky standing alone in a dramatic spotlight, that the boxer\u2019s facial expression doesn\u2019t match his victorious pose. His arms are up but his face hangs down. He looks thoughtful, quiet, maybe even a bit blue. We\u2019ll come back to this quality shortly.)<\/p>\n

But Farber and his collaborators \u2014 Louis Marchesano, Caro Campos and Joslyn Moore \u2014 haven\u2019t organized \u201cRising Up\u201d to make a case for the statue\u2019s virtuosity. Instead they\u2019re fascinated by the compelling and complicated stories \u2014 about power, about fame, about Philadelphia\u2019s sense of place \u2014 that have always swirled around it. These are stories that Farber, a native of the city, knows well. He explored them at length in \u201cThe Statue,\u201d a 2023 podcast he produced with the radio station WHYY that helped break the logjam<\/a> of opposition at the museum to bringing Schomberg\u2019s artwork in from the cold.<\/p>\n

Several pieces in the final galleries of \u201cRising Up\u201d offer commentary on masculinity, starting with the way many men fight their battles alone. (One section is labeled \u201cShadowboxing.\u201d) Bombast here gives way to a more contemplative and critical tone, framing the acts of men who suffer silently or act out violently.<\/p>\n

This stretch of artworks \u2014 by Cassils, Paul Pfeiffer, Kevin Jerome Everson and Derrick Adams, among others \u2014 is enough to lead any visitor paying careful attention, and especially any male one, to reflect on the way he moves through the world. Our impulse, flashing back to Rocky\u2019s own expression, is suddenly less to raise our arms in triumph than to look for the nearest mirror. Or therapist.<\/p>\n

Among its many other strengths and surprising tributaries, \u201cRising Up\u201d turns out to be the museum show American men didn\u2019t know we needed.<\/p>\n

Rising Up: Rocky and the Making of Monuments<\/p>\n

Through Aug. 2 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2600 Benjamin Franklin Parkway; 215-763-8100, philamuseum.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n