Image: Rodin Museum, London
The Philadelphia Museum of Art’s exhibition 'Rising Up: Rocky and the Making of Monuments' remains on view through August 2, bringing together more than two millennia of art and visual culture to examine boxing, celebrity, race and public monuments. The show asks why millions of people from around the world visit the Rocky statue by the museum steps, and it frames that question through works ranging from ancient sculpture to contemporary art.
Organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art with collaboration from Monument Lab, the exhibition is guest curated by Paul Farber, director and co-founder of Monument Lab and host of NPR/WHYY’s podcast 'The Statue'. The museum describes the project as an art history of the Rocky statue that unpacks how a movie prop became a public art piece and a site of global pilgrimage. Admission is free with museum entry.
According to the museum, 'Rising Up' traces artists’ engagement with boxing and celebrity across ancient sculptures, nineteenth-century European works and images from the golden age of boxing in the United States. The exhibition also turns to contemporary artists including Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Glenn Ligon, Hank Willis Thomas and Lisa Brice, whose work revisits that history through the lens of race, gender and celebrity. The museum says those works illuminate what visitors project onto the Rocky statue, including ideals of the underdog such as perseverance, spirit and grit.
The exhibition is substantial in scope, featuring over 150 works by more than 50 artists. Among the works pictured on the museum’s exhibition page are 'Blue Horizon, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, January 1990' by Larry Fink, a neck amphora dated 510-490 BCE, Carrie Mae Weems’s 'Philadelphia Museum of Art from Museums series', Keith Haring’s 'Portrait of a Macho Camacho', Rashid Johnson’s 'Self Portrait laying on Jack Johnson’s Grave', Glenn Ligon’s 'Skin Tight (Ice Cube’s Eyes)' and Hank Willis Thomas’s 'Solidarity'. The page also notes a photograph of A. Thomas Schomberg at work, linking the exhibition back to the Rocky statue’s maker.
The museum says the exhibition includes an accompanying publication edited by Farber, with contributions from Philadelphia artist Alex Da Corte, former Philadelphia Eagle and Super Bowl champion Malcolm Jenkins, and film critic Carrie Rickey. The curatorial team also includes Caro Campos, assistant curator at Monument Lab, and Joslyn Moore, exhibition assistant at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, alongside Louis Marchesano, the museum’s Marion Boulton “Kippy” Stroud Deputy Director of Curatorial Affairs and Conservation.
'Reising Up: Rocky and the Making of Monuments' is located in the Main Building’s Dorrance Galleries in Philadelphia and runs through August 2, 2026. The museum’s newsletter highlights the final day of the exhibition alongside a family festival elsewhere on the campus, but the exhibition itself remains the central date on the calendar as the show enters its closing stretch.
