A statue of Sylvester Stallone’s fictional boxer Rocky Balboa is the focal point of an examination of the power of monuments opening at the Philadelphia Museum of Art this weekend that marks two millennia of boxing and celebrity.

The statue, placed on the “Rocky Steps” of the museum in 1982, six years after the the 1976 film Rocky made Stallone a star, is one of Philadelphia’s most popular tourist attractions, visited by an estimated 4 million people annually.

For many, including show curator Paul Farber, Rocky, who rises from a struggling Philadelphia club fighter and debt collector to “go the distance” with the heavyweight champion, offers a more personal story.

The show, 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 re-imagining monuments as places for belonging, learning, and healing”.

After several years in which monuments and their meaning have been a source of political and cultural friction, Farber told ArtNews he had taken the Rocky statue for granted. That is, until he noticed the lines of people waiting to observe it and, inevitably, be photographed mimicking it.

“No matter what time of day or time of year there’s a queue. I started to research it five years ago and found as many people visit the Rocky statue as visit the Statue of Liberty – more than visit the Liberty Bell here in Philly.”

“It’s a cultural meeting ground,” Farber told the outlet. “It’s a site of global pilgrimage for people finding a way through pain and difficulty. He’s the patron saint of the underdog. But it bears mentioning that the most mythical Philadelphian is a white boxer who never lived, while there are many Black Philadelphia boxers who were and are major members of their community.”

The exhibition comes as the Rocky franchise (there are six films, including the last, eponymous Rocky Balboa) celebrates its 50th anniversary. It aims, according to the museum, to answer the question of why, in a moment of reckoning and reimagining for monuments generally, “do millions of people from around the world visit the Rocky statue by the steps at the Philadelphia Museum of Art?”

The answer it offers is that fighters have been shaped into public figures for millennia. To make its case, the exhibition draws on ancient sculptures, including the classic Hellenistic Seated Boxer, 19th century European works of art, images from boxing’s golden age in the US – including Jack Johnson, who became the first Black world heavyweight boxing champion – and works by contemporary figures including Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Glenn Ligon.

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

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

Stallone himself has weighed in, leaving the curator a long string of voicemails, explaining that the steps of the museum had seemed “like a magical area, in intellectual bastion that I would only look at from afar, like another city, the Acropolis or some incredible monument.”

The steps would in their own way define who Rocky is, he added: “We’ve seen him squalor, we’ve seen him running across cobble stones – wet, cold, dank, whatever. The fact that he eventually runs from squalor and poverty, and decides that what will determine the pinnacle of his success is to run up the steps of this magnificent structure that he doesn’t under what is inside or what it represents.”

Stallone commissioned the bronze from Colorado sculptor A Thomas Schomberg, whose work is included in several US museums. Farber, the curator, told ArtNews that even the artist is unsure if the Rocky statue is art or a movie prop.

“I spent a lot of time with the artist, whose work is renowned, but is plagued by that question, and it haunted me,” Farber told the outlet. “I spent time in his studio and looked at his process and understood the other work he made … they could have asked for a styrofoam prop. But he worked with an artist who works in bronze.”