Community Corner

Ex-Cop Forges New Career as Sculptor

Rick Mongilutz, a South Whitehall sculptor and former Allentown City police officer, will show his work, Fresh Relics, Sunday at the Woodstone Country Club.

Rick Mongilutz remembers the day he first picked up a mallet, chisel and 300-pound hunk of white marble and began to pound away at 17 years worth of gut-wrenching cases and images.

That’s when time seemed to stand still for the former head of the Allentown City Police Department’s Child Sexual Abuse Unit. With every hammer blow, the stocky cop with massive biceps began to forget about the outside world, hewing a kind of forcible exorcism of the unspeakable acts of human depravity he’d investigated.

A makeshift studio in the unheated garage of his South Whitehall home became his refuge from bearing witness to others’ pain. Mongilutz toiled for hours in his studio, chiseling powerful images out of the rough stone, marble castoffs he buys from monument makers and cemetery suppliers.

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Now, 12 years later, what began as an accidental hobby his wife had encouraged him to pursue has blossomed into an all-consuming passion for this retired cop. On Sunday, he will exhibit his work for the first time at an art show at the Woodstone Country Club in Danielsville, Northampton County, about 17 miles north of South Whitehall.

Standing in his front yard on a recent day, Mongilutz walks amid what could be an ancient Roman or medieval cemetery surrounding his tidy suburban split-level home. These are the pieces he’s taking to the art show.

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Drawn to the somber, static iconography of medieval and Classical statuary, he calls his work “fresh relics,” and is the name of his website, www.freshrelics.net. Many of his pieces are replicas or interpretations of more famous work.

“Marble is the medium to express sorrow,” Mongilutz said.

Visitors are greeted at his front door by a chilling, skeletal figure in smooth white marble, dying an agonizing death at the Natzweiler concentration camp in France. Mongilutz first saw the original in bronze at the Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris, that piece itself a replica of the original by George Halbout at the memorial in the village of Struthof.

Any number of the reliefs and torsos sprinkled throughout his property would be at home in cemeteries and mausoleums.  In fact, Mongilutz said, he wants his own headstone to be the piece leaning against a fence— a shrouded grim reaper, his bony hand at his mouth in a quizzical gesture. “Memento mori,” it is inscribed.

As a police officer, Mongilutz eventually left the sex crimes unit to work a neighborhood beat on bike patrol in downtown Allentown. Kids remembered him as the big cop on a bike with a walrus mustache.

“I loved the citizens. I had an affect on people and it made me feel good,” he said.

“You don’t realize how much your identity is wrapped up in your career,” Mongilutz said, “especially for a cop.”

When he retired two years ago, the transition wasn’t easy and he became depressed.  Sculpting was an outlet.

“I remember I was working on that piece at the time,” he said, pointing to a smooth piece beneath a tree that might seem more at home on top of a 14th century sarcophagus. It depicts a woman lying supine, her face expressionless, her hands clasped in repose, a small dog rests at her feet.

She died in childbirth, he said.

Certain memories of child abuse cases are never far away for Mongilutz. Such as the time he took a young girl’s panties as evidence. Her mother called him several days later to ask for them back because they were her only pair.

Sculpture has given him a new identity. Mongilutz can easily spend the better part of a day working in his studio amid the pulverized marble dust, chipping away at the form he reveals in half-inch segments with his calloused hands wrapped around primitive tools.

Most people don’t “get” his sculpture, Mongilutz conceded.  Sometimes well-meaning people ask him if he can make a sculpture of their kids, or worse, he grimaced, “Santa Claus.”

One look around the property would reveal he doesn’t dabble in the sentimental. There, beyond a swing set and tranquil pond lush with greenery, sits the bust of woman, her mouth contorted in a scream, her hands clutching her breast. A nun, he explained, killed in a barrage of arrows.

Mongilutz was recently commissioned to do a piece for the prayer garden at Nativity Lutheran Church on Tilghman Street and he takes great delight that some might find solace in his work.

But he is still finding his audience.

Maybe it’s not the Lehigh Valley, he said. Maybe it’s New York.

“Wouldn’t these look great in a New York loft?,” he mused. His latest work is based on a bust of Karl Marx.

Mongilutz is excited about his show on Sunday in Danielsville, since these are not easily transported pieces. The artist he has become will have a chance to shine.

But the ex-cop is never far away. Those reflexes kicked in recently when he was enjoying a leisurely outdoor lunch downtown with his wife, Lehigh County Judge Kelly Banach. A young man who was being chased flew past him. “Stop him!,” someone yelled.

Without a moment’s hesitation, Mongilutz took off after him, scattering his lunch in the process, before reaching the man who was tackled by Lehigh County probation officers.

Rick Mongilutz’s Fresh Relics will be shown at an art and wine show from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m. Sunday at the Woodstone Country Club and Lodge, 3777 Dogwood Road, Danielsville, Pa. Tickets cost $10.


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