Marty Bennett amongst just a few of the buddies that encourage his oeuvre.
Multidisciplinary artist Martellus “Marty” Bennett, these days of the Houston Freedmen’s City Conservancy and Modern Arts Museum Houston collaborative set up Bennett Highway, just lately accomplished one more spectacular achievement: He overhauled his web site.
“I made it for espresso. So if there’s a Saturday or a Sunday, you get your espresso, it’s the web site that you possibly can sit down and spend time with,” he says.
Because the artistic mastermind behind MR. TOMONOSHi, Bennett has now archived his intensive portfolio of illustrations, animations, video games, books (together with audiobooks), pictures, movies, industrial design, yakisugi (a type of Japanese sculpture utilizing charred wooden because the medium), style design, and writing, in addition to case research and lesson plans for educators. One may simply spend a whole day searching his web site with the identical eager eye and inquisitiveness spent at an artwork museum, however with the bonus of a scorching beverage and pajamas.
MR. TOMONOSHi isn’t a model. Or a personality. Or an thought. Or Bennett himself. Or, slightly, it is, however within the sense that it’s the entire above and extra.
“I feel now I’m at a spot the place I simply am. With the intention to be, you will need to turn out to be. With the intention to turn out to be, you have to be, and in an effort to be, you will need to begin being. I’m simply being MR. TOMONOSHi,” Bennett says. “That is what I put on. That is what I hearken to. That is how I transfer. These are the songs I wish to write. So I feel that that’s sort of like the entire thought of MR. TOMONOSHi and myself in it. And I consider it as me enjoying in my very own creativeness with others in each the true world and my imaginative world.”
He describes his present life as “very Zen.” A visit throughout Japan impressed him to retire from the NFL in 2018 after 10 seasons, 5 groups together with the Dallas Cowboys and the New England Patriots, and a Tremendous Bowl win. He bonded together with his tour information, Miho, with whom he nonetheless shares a friendship at present. Each day, she wakes up at 4:30 within the morning. She likes to sleep as a result of it means she’ll get up—and she or he loves waking up, as a result of it means she will get to re-experience life for one more day. This, she advised Bennett, is her secret to being such a contented individual. Among the many Shinto shrines, he mirrored on her recommendation and what would lead him to a life the place each his sleeping and waking hours had been filled with marvel and pleasure.
And that’s when he had his epiphany, the one which moved his life from the stadium grounds to the playgrounds.
“Making stuff. Man, that’s the one factor that I might do it doesn’t matter what. I sit up for assembly individuals making stuff. I like making stuff. I like speaking about making stuff. I simply love making stuff,” Bennett says. “Nothing particularly that I like making greater than the opposite factor. I simply love the act of constructing and what occurs after I make issues.”
Bennett would not restrict himself to at least one medium. He follows his concepts slightly than pigeonholing himself.
MR. TOMONOSHi was born of this revelation. Impressed by one of many Japanese phrases for pal, tomodachi, this new chapter provided Bennett an opportunity to remold his life into the one he envisioned for himself whereas on his travels. All of his artistic philosophies are embodied within the MR. TOMONOSHi expertise. And it is an expertise. One can’t passively devour any facet of Bennett’s prodigious output. That is clearly true of Bennett Highway, designed particularly as an immersive house, the Discipline Day: Recess Reimagined occasion at Discovery Inexperienced in March 2025, and his kids’s books like Expensive Black Boy and the sequence Hey A.J.
All the pieces Bennett creates comes from his limitless curiosity. He’s traveled the world, and his library overflows with books on matters as various as ikebana (Japanese-style flower arranging) and Pixar motion pictures. Conversations with him can gleefully bounce from Tim Burton’s preoccupations with German Expressionism to Whats up Kitty to how American tradition is Black tradition to kickball to the Hung Hsien retrospective at Asia Society. And again round once more. His influences, and his need to dig deeply into them to discover his personal artistic voice, are proudly infused into the ultimate outcomes. Viewers all turn out to be lively members within the work as a result of it explicitly invitations everybody to hitch Bennett in his journey.
Take his yakisugi vases, for instance. If positioned in a well-known gallery or museum context, they’ll’t merely be registered as fascinating vessels earlier than shifting on to the following exhibit. Their burned, blistering exteriors result in ideas on how Bennett completed that with such precision. From there, what impressed him to work with the method. And a go to to his web site, simply as a lot a manifesto as portfolio, chronicles his personal path towards studying about yakisugi, what he realized about himself, and the way this turns into bodily manifest in an artwork object. We turn out to be simply as enraptured by the world as he’s, seeing issues by means of his eyes however with an entreaty for us to hunt solutions on our personal.
“I feel there’s a disaster of creativeness… If you’re outdoors with pals and there’s nothing that occupies the house…since we stay by means of units and telephones, then the creativeness that we search is meant to be delivered on the cellphone to us,” Bennett says. “After which once we wish to ship creativeness to others, we put up it on the cellphone as nicely.”
Play, enjoyable, and curiosity are all on the core of Bennett’s inventive philosophy.
As prolific as he’s, he all the time has one thing thrilling within the works. On Juneteenth, he launched a hip-hop and spoken phrase album on the contradictions inherent to spirituality. He’s additionally engaged on an animated sequence for Disney, the place he and his daughter Jett voice two of the lead characters.
Above all else, MR. TOMONOSHi is simply plain enjoyable. Whereas Bennett asks us to suppose lengthy and exhausting about what we’re or listening to, he additionally desires us to take action with a powerful sense of play and group, to seek out all the attractive issues about this strange and not-so-little world all of us occupy. And to take action as his beloved companions on the diverging roads forward.
“My life is an artwork piece, and I’m performing my means by means of it. And the efficiency is actual. It’s based mostly in actuality,” Bennett says. “Even after I draw MR. TOMONOSHi, he wears the identical garments that I put on. I don’t draw outdoors of myself or issues like that. It’s how I see myself in my very own creativeness.”
