In Rocky's Shadow
Review: Rising Up: Rocky and the Making of Monuments at the Philadelphia Museum of Art
Review by Joni Sullivan
Since 2006, the Rocky statue—a movie prop left over from the filming of Rocky III—has been drawing long lines at the bottom of the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s steps, technically city property. The monument receives as many annual visitors as the Statue of Liberty—nearly 4 million. Before the pandemic, the PMA welcomed roughly 750,000 annual visitors; that’s less than 20% of Rocky’s numbers.
After years of side-eyeing the mythic local hero, the museum has finally embraced him. In 2024, they installed a second Rocky, on loan from Sylvester Stallone, at the top of their steps. This year, the PMA brought the original statue inside its galleries, while a statue of world heavyweight champion Joe Frazier will take its place at the bottom of the steps. In tandem with this move, the PMA presents a survey of boxing, monuments, and Philadelphia, using Rocky as a filter to perform engagement with statue politics while avoiding its fault lines. The exhibit functions less as a critical examination of these themes and more as a safe celebration. The contents smell of a radical curator capitulating to the demands of an art institution. Rising Up: Rocky and the Making of Monuments is on view now through August 2, 2026.
Moving the statue caught Philadelphians’ attention. Locals are invested and have opinions, evidenced across local press and online forums. In the ever-reliable Philadelphia subreddit, a user complains that they “have real disdain for people who will take photos on the Rocky steps but not even consider entering the city’s world-class art museum when they’re literally right there.” Another user counters that “it’s pretty understandable when you consider taking a picture with Rocky is free and the cost for a family of 4 to get into the museum is over $120 after taxes.” These are nuanced, lived opinions from people who have genuine, layered relationships with the city.
National coverage of the exhibit rings less thoughtful. Coinciding with the opening, Jimmy Fallon included a sketch on The Tonight Show featuring satirical (read: bizarre and unfunny) interviews that fail to mention why the statue was moved or name Joe Frazier. While the broader public may view Philly’s Rocky as unworthy of critical attention, locals are engaging in a complex mythology on display in civic space—a reality the PMA and guest curator Paul Farber are attempting to address.
Unlike Fallon, Farber brings local insight and credibility as a Philadelphia native. He is the director and co-founder of Monument Lab and host of the NPR podcast The Statue, a six-part narrative podcast about the Rocky monument. By bringing the original statue indoors, he aims to invite the millions of outside visitors into the galleries, while simultaneously provoking the museum to acknowledge the vibrant public culture happening on what he calls the “people’s pedestal” of the front steps.
In a recent Philadelphia Magazine interview ahead of the exhibit, Farber discusses several instances of statue dismantlement, including the 1776 melting of the King George III statue for Revolutionary War bullets after the reading of the Declaration of Independence, the 2020 removal of the statue commemorating Frank Rizzo, former police commissioner and Mayor of Philadelphia, and Donald Trump’s recent attempted censorship of the slavery exhibit at the President’s House. In this exhibit, however, Farber argues that the statue and steps function as a unifying space, capable of fostering dialogue and collective healing.
The exhibit is organized into eight galleries spanning antiquity to contemporary art. Structurally, the first half operates as a historical survey of boxing. Black American boxers are given their deserved spotlight in early works depicting formerly enslaved, American-born boxer Tom Molineaux up against English champion Tom Cribb. A bust and a series of black-and-white photographs show Alabama-born boxer Joe Louis, whose 1938 defeat of German boxer Max Schmeling symbolized the battle between democracy and Nazism.1
The exhibit then shifts its focus to the boxer as celebrity, Philadelphia, and Joe Frazier. Before Rocky, Frazier was punching hanging beef carcasses in a Kensington slaughterhouse and training on the steps of the PMA. Frazier, a Black man who beat the odds of poverty through incredible hard work and grit to become heavyweight champion of the world, is history’s real underdog-hero. His story informed the Rocky character, whose white, working-class narrative provides a safer archetype.
In the gallery titled “Primetime,” the crossover between athletes and pop art is highlighted by works from Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Warhol’s screenprints of Muhammad Ali are positioned near a small television playing footage from the 1971 Fight of the Century between Ali and Frazier, anchoring the historical reality of the sport against the fictionalized hero in the next room, who is dramatically spotlit to cast an iconic silhouette on the back wall—the thematic center of the exhibition. Rocky is still the hero, his shadow ultimately eclipsing Frazier’s, again.
I listened to guests discuss the exhibit: “I grew up watching Joe Frazier, you know.” “Oh yeah, I know all these guys. You know they’re missing a lot of guys, if they wanted to do it that way.” I realized this guest wished the show were more boxing-oriented. At first, I thought that maybe he was missing the point. But then, maybe the point was not straightforward. “Boxing” was emerging as a conceptual metaphor for social justice, with Rocky as a great unifying monument.
The second half of the exhibit reads like a contemporary group show where the viewer is led directly from uplifting fiction into turbulent present. A compelling inclusion is the performance photography from Becoming an Image by Cassils. A nude Cassils fights a clay plinth in total darkness, illuminated only by a camera flash; the resulting battered clay was cast in bronze and is displayed alongside the images. The artist’s goal is to “bear witness to the often-underreported violence against transgender communities.” In the same gallery, photographs of the 2020 protests on the PMA steps are displayed. Here, Farber’s thesis plays out well; the museum and the public merge.
In the last gallery titled “Underdogs Rising,” Hank Willis Thomas’s Solidarity is prominently displayed. The bronze arm raised in a fist immediately invokes track stars Tommie Smith and John Carlos protesting for Black liberation at the 1968 Olympics. However, an extended label notes the pose has recently been appropriated by political leaders to express strongman tactics, referencing a photograph of Donald Trump following the 2024 Butler assassination attempt. Has this image become a monument, too? The exhibition raises the question but hesitates to answer it. By pointing out the gesture’s mutation from oppressed resistance to populist authoritarianism, the exhibit touches a live wire regarding how political power weaponizes imagery—only to pivot back to the safety of the underdog narrative in neighboring works that emphasize the fight of the oppressed without confronting the monuments of the oppressor.
These hesitations highlight a broader evasion. The PMA is mounting a show about the nature of monuments at a time when America’s relationship with public statues is intensely fractured. I thought of the Christopher Columbus statue in South Philly that was guarded by citizens with guns in 2020; the Confederate statues that have been decommissioned since 2015—a subject tackled head-on by the concurrent MONUMENTS exhibition co-presented at MOCA and The Brick in Los Angeles in which Farber has personally been a collaborator; and the protest art installations of Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein holding hands in front of the White House. By using Rocky as a filter, the show commits fully to the mythology of perseverance and avoids grappling with today’s fraught reality of American monuments and more overt political imagery.
To complicate things further is Sylvester Stallone himself. In November 2024, the actor introduced his longtime friend Trump at a Mar-a-Lago gala as “the second George Washington” and was subsequently named both a Trump “special ambassador” to Hollywood and a Kennedy Center honoree. This is crucial context that the exhibition—organized in active partnership with Stallone and built around a statue cast from his likeness—never acknowledges. Can the monument be separated from the actor, and the actor from the politicians he actively champions? The museum’s evasion relies on the hope that it can.
At the end of the exhibit sits a tiny replica of the Rocky monument, Rocky with Missing Arm (Altadena, California). It was a gift from the sculptor A. Thomas Schomberg to comedian Max Silvestri, who lost his home in the 2025 Southern California wildfires. When Silvestri returned to sort through the rubble, he found that the replica had survived the blaze, missing one arm.
“I’m gonna take finding a melted statue of the ultimate underdog as a lovely omen: don’t count Altadena out,” Silvestri noted in an Instagram post.
The melted Rocky stands as a testament to what visitors are looking for when they line up at the museum steps. People see themselves in Rocky; they see resilience, grit, and hope in an underdog. So they want his photograph. They want to rub his toes. Maybe they will even go inside the museum to learn more. But, as Farber notes, “it’s really important to have symbols that last beyond your generation, but I don’t think that a monument alone saves us.” Ultimately, the PMA uses Rocky to soften the political turbulence raging outside its walls in service of “collective healing,” stopping short just as the difficult dialogues begin.
Joni Sullivan is a painter, writer, and educator based in Princeton, NJ. She currently teaches painting at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture in Philadelphia. Sullivan holds an MFA from Boston University and a BHA from Carnegie Mellon University, and her critical art writing has been published in Philly Art Blog and Title Magazine.
Schmeling wasn't actually a Nazi and famously hid two Jewish teenagers, the sons of a friend, in his Berlin hotel room during Kristallnacht in November 1938. Forces beyond him nevertheless fixed the fight's symbolism. Nazi propaganda claimed him as an Aryan champion, and American media, particularly the Black press, framed Louis's victory as a rebuke to fascism.
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