“It was a scene that Esteban Sulé Marquez-Monsanto, or Sulé, describes as somewhat “apocalyptic.” But he also saw an opportunity.

Alongside other artists, Sulé began to treat these plywood boards as blank canvases, and became part of a wave that ultimately gave birth to a new artist collective, The SoHo Renaissance Factory. In doing so, Sulé and others have reclaimed the streets of SoHo as a cutting-edge artists’ space, as it once was in the early 1970s.

Before this summer, Sulé hadn’t shared his art with anyone for a decade. But he was driven by the protests of Floyd’s killing to start painting publicly again. “I wanted to create something to inspire people to keep fighting,” he says, “regardless of what was going on around in their lives.”

Sulé started painting murals of Black samurai characters — some of them wearing face masks with messages like My Color Is Not A Crime! “I wanted to demonstrate visually that Black is timeless and ancient and still here to this day — still fighting,” he says.”