More than 20 years after his untimely death, we still can’t get enough of Tupac Shakur. The West Coast legend was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on Friday, a biopic about his life will hit theaters in June. And soon, a new statue will depict his likeness.
TMZ reports that the statue will be erected at the amphitheater formerly known as the Tupac Amaru Shakur Center for the Arts in Stone Mountain, Georgia. The new owner, Jim Burnett, plans to install a statue to replace the old statue that was there before.
Artist Nijel Binns (who has also done statues of Michael Jackson and Shirley Temple) will lead the project, using a 13-inch clay model to create a 7-foot bronze statue that will cost more than half a million dollars to complete. Burnett hopes to unveil the statue this fall, near the 21st anniversary of Pac’s death on Sept. 13, 1996.
Pac’s mother Afeni Shakur launched the Tupac Amaru Shakur Foundation the year after her son’s death, hoping for it to help inner city kids the same way that the Baltimore School for the Arts helped Pac. According to Rolling Stone, the foundation hosted an annual performing arts day camp for Atlanta-area youth and had the likes of actress Jasmine Guy (of A Different World fame), dancer Junella Segura Cooper (who has worked with Mary J. Blige and Usher), and Pac’s lawyer Dina LaPolt providing lessons in their respective fields for students.
The Tupac Amaru Shakur Center for the Arts opened in 2005, near the Georgia home that Pac bought for his mother. But as Pac’s posthumous catalog began to dry up, the center couldn’t sustain itself financially, leading his family to sell the estate to Burnett in 2016 for $600,000 – and take home the old statue that stood on its grounds.
Burnett told Rolling Stone last year that the property’s theater will be an indoor play center, the peace garden will be a water park, and the dance studio has been transformed into office suites. But Burnett still seems to want Pac’s legacy to live on at the property.