Forty-Year-Old Mystery Behind Kingsborough Sculpture Has Been Solved

When I was a student at Kingsborough High School (now Leon M. Goldstein High School) at Kingsborough Community College, I often passed by a rusted sculpture with Hebrew lettering as I wandered the campus.

I once stopped a guard nearby and asked him if he knew what the deal was. He shrugged. I moved on, and only occasionally thought about it again.

Little did I know, the same question of the sculpture’s origins had baffled faculty members for years. The school had no record of it being erected, or the sculptor who created it.

That mystery has finally been solved thanks to a friend of the artist who called the school after the sculptor passed away, hoping to do a memorial tribute beside his creation.

The Daily News reports:

The Brooklyn film historian [Ken Gordon] and Kingsborough alum wanted permission to hold a memorial service for his pal Marty Resnick, who died in August of cancer of the esophagus — and they wanted to do it next to his baffling sculpture.

“They had no idea who he was and what that thing was,” Gordon told the Daily News Monday, nearly 40 years after the sculpture was installed on the edge of the 70-acre Manhattan Beach campus, near a school gymnasium.

Resnick and Gordon attended Kingsborough in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Howard Fields, a friend of Resnick’s from James Madison High School, was a frequent visitor.

… Eventually, Resnick grew tired of the hustle of his home borough, bought 200 acres of forest land in Southeast Ohio and moved out. He left his sculpture, “The Ten Commandments,” behind and probably never saw it again.

Resnick’s back-to-the-land move to Ohio wasn’t novel in the early 1970s, but Gordon and Fields said he’s one of the few who never gave up. He spent the next 40 years living in cabins he built himself, scratching a living from his artistic talents and refusing to take a conventional job.

And now we know.