The Philadelphia Museum of Art is bringing the bronze Rocky Balboa statue inside after decades of tension over the fictional boxer’s place at the museum, a move that exposes how even a public landmark can be managed through ownership, access, and institutional control. The statue, which has long drawn visitors from around the world to the museum’s steps, will be relocated as the museum opens an exhibition that turns the whole saga into a curated lesson in monuments, identity, and struggle.
Who Controls the Landmark
The statue has sat for years at the bottom of the museum’s steps, where it became a point of pilgrimage for visitors who climbed up to pose beside it. But the arrangement was never simple or neutral: the city owns the spot where the statue sits, not the museum. The museum once fought to have the statue removed after it was left on the steps following filming of the Rocky movies. It was later relocated to South Philadelphia before returning to the bottom of the steps in 2006.
Now the museum is bringing the bronze figure indoors with the opening this weekend of Rising Up: Rocky and the Making of Monuments. The exhibition examines how a fictional fighter became a real-world symbol and places the statue within art history and Philadelphia’s identity. The move also shifts the statue from a contested public-facing perch into the museum’s controlled interior, where the institution can frame the meaning of the object on its own terms.
Louis Marchesano, the museum’s deputy director of curatorial affairs and conservation, described the institution’s long struggle with the statue in language that sounded less like stewardship than reluctant surrender. He said, “The museum has had — and I hate to say this, no pun intended — a rocky relationship with the statue,” and, “It took us decades to come to terms with it. But I’m glad that we did.”
Pilgrimage, Spectacle, and the Crowd
According to the Philadelphia Visitor Center, about 4 million people visit the steps each year, rivaling the nearby Liberty Bell in annual foot traffic. Visitors from around the world continue to make the climb, turning the museum’s staircase into a kind of unofficial public ritual built around a film character and the institution that hosts him.
David Muller, a wrestling coach from France, said Balboa’s trials and travails are “good for the next generation.” He said, “The movie ‘Rocky’ is important for the mind of sport and the mind of life,” after running with his students up the steps as they raised their hands at the top, smiling and punching the air like boxers. Kate Tarchalska traveled from Poland with family and made the statue one of their stops. She said, “He was my hero when I was younger,” and, “And now I am so glad I could be in the same spot as him.” Suraj Kumar, visiting his aunt in Philadelphia from St. Louis, photographed the statue to share with his father, who first introduced him to the films when he was growing up in Bengaluru, India. Kumar said, “When I got to know this statue is here, I was like, I really have to come down here.”
The crowd’s devotion is part of what the museum is now packaging as history. The exhibition was created by guest curator Paul Farber, who spent years exploring the meaning of the statue and public monuments, including through his NPR podcasts, before bringing the conversation into the museum. The show spans more than 2,000 years of boxing imagery and traces what Marchesano described as a common theme of people responding to the body under struggle.
Marchesano said, “The common theme that runs throughout 2,000 years of boxing imagery is that people respond to the body under struggle, a conflict in much the same way today as they did 2,500 years ago.” He added, “It’s not simply about watching two people beat each other up — it’s about endurance, internal fortitude and internal struggle.”
From Street-Level Myth to Museum Property
One gallery in the exhibition places Rocky in the global boxing fever of the 1970s and features works by Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol, all created during a time when boxing had the world’s attention. Marchesano said, “In the 1970s, we knew minute by minute who the heavyweight champion of the world was,” and, “The artists in this gallery are responding to that global frenzy. Sylvester Stallone, in ‘Rocky,’ was doing the same — thinking about internal and external struggle.” Another gallery turns to Philadelphia itself, presenting photographs of the Blue Horizon boxing gym and a section on Joe Frazier, whose real-life story at least partially inspired Rocky. Marchesano said, “Without Joe Frazier, Rocky doesn’t exist.”
When the exhibition closes in August, the statue inside will move to a permanent home at the top of the museum’s steps, a place it has never officially held. The statue currently outside remains on loan from Stallone. Rocky’s longtime spot at the bottom of the steps will not be empty, because a statue of Frazier will replace it.
The whole arrangement reads like a tidy institutional solution: the museum keeps the pilgrimage, the city keeps the land, Stallone keeps the loan, and the public keeps climbing. What changes is who gets to define the meaning of the monument and where it is allowed to stand.