Tupac in Herford: Paolo Chiasera's 'tupacproject' at MARTa

Anyone approaching the MARTa museum in Herford inevitably looks up: perched on a column stands a young man with a bare chest, his arms behind his back, his gaze cast downward. It is Tupac Shakur. The fact that the figure stands of all places in an East Westphalian furniture town is an integral part of the artwork. The concise overview is provided on the page Tupac and Germany—this page covers the underlying concept, context, and history of its creation.

The Artwork Bears a Web Address as Its Title

The official title of the work reads like an internet link: www.tupacproject.it. It was created by the Italian artist Paolo Chiasera, born in Bologna in 1978. He studied there from 1997 to 2002 and also attended the Kunsthochschule Weißensee in Berlin; today he lives in Berlin (NRW-Skulptur). The documentation platform dates the piece to 2002 and catalogs it as a concrete sculpture, measuring approximately 650 by 120 centimeters.

The statue was originally the centerpiece of a website, as described by the distributor of the accompanying book. It was intended to set off a network asking what a monument for our own era might look like-a sculpture fostering dialogue as texts inscribed on the pedestal are continued online. Through this, the artist sought to draft an alternative map of the world, stemming from currents of so-called “underground culture.” The book was published by Motto Books together with the Limehouse Arts Foundation, featuring contributions by Lorenzo Benedetti, Hans Ulrich Obrist, and Pier Luigi Tazzi.

A Rapper on a Pedestal for Generals

NRW-Skulptur conceives the piece as an investigation of the monument in public space. Chiasera raises questions about the selection, meaning, and function of such role models for both historical and contemporary (youth) cultures, challenging the social consensus that makes monuments possible in the first place. The sculpture thus touches on the fundamental question of who is elevated onto a pedestal at all.

Tupac provides the illustrative subject for this inquiry: he was convicted and revered at the same time, the son of a Black Panther activist (Afeni Shakur), and the star of a genre distrusted by politics and cultural critics alike. As the idol of a youth subculture, he occupies a monument format that was otherwise reserved for military commanders and statesmen.

The platform goes one step further, characterizing the sculpture as the only monument to a Black man in Germany. However, this is the documentation’s own self-description rather than a verified count. The claim can neither be proven nor easily refuted.

In Front of MARTa Since the Opening in 2005

MARTa opened on May 7, 2005. The name stands for Möbel (furniture), Art, and Ambiente, referencing Herford’s furniture industry; Frank Gehry designed the building (Wikipedia). Ever since the 2005 opening exhibition, the figure has stood outside the museum on a pedestal nearly five meters high (Motto Distribution). According to the book distributor, it has become part of the “museum skyline” and piques the curiosity of visitors. A photograph from June 18, 2005, on Wikimedia Commons already shows it at the entrance.

In contrast, the magazine Daily Art Magazine (2026) claims that the sculpture dates only from 2007 and initially stood at street level, “as if an earthquake had pushed it up from its roots.” No second source could be found to substantiate either detail; the information from NRW-Skulptur and MARTa’s opening exhibition therefore remains authoritative.

In that same year, 2005, an entirely different Tupac statue was dedicated in Stone Mountain, Georgia: a bronze figure in a suit holding a book of poems at the arts center of the Tupac foundation (Monuments). Herford’s figure is its counterpart-not a familial act of remembrance by relatives, but an artistic question posed to society.

688 Spray-Painted Bricks and a Lost Bet

The column underwent changes over the years. On April 25, 2019, the Neue Westfälische (Ralf Bittner) reported that graffiti artist Sponk was redesigning it outside MARTa. According to the headline, he spray-painted 688 bricks with spray cans to do so. The full article is behind a paywall; further details regarding the commission and occasion could therefore not be verified.

The monument also gained renown through an anecdote: rapper Marteria lost a 50-euro bet because he refused to believe that a Tupac statue existed in Herford, and subsequently visited it together with Casper (Motto Distribution). On September 1, 2026, the Neue Westfälische called it “Herford’s most curious monument”; a photograph shows the figure still at the museum. The article highlights the contrast between gangsta rap and a conservative Hanseatic town.

Herford’s Tupac Continues to Stand Outside the Museum

According to the reviewed sources, the statue continues to stand in front of MARTa. Who commissioned the work and how it came to be placed at the museum is not documented in publicly accessible sources. Additional memorial sites are listed on the page Monuments; the technological variant of resurrection is covered on the page Hologram.