A bronze bust of George Floyd was defaced with grey paint in the morning of Oct. 3, according to CNN.  

“There’s video footage police were able to ascertain,” said NYPD detective Fraces Sammon on CNN. “They show a male ducking down under one of the statues. He then mixes something together, and, as he skates away, he throws a container of paint at the statue.” 

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Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time such an incident has occurred. A Floyd statue in Brooklyn was vandalized in June; authorities investigated the incident as a hate crime. 

“The crazy thing is we knew that this could happen. It just kind of shows that what we’re doing is sparking conversation, it’s sparking controversy. That is the mission of art to invoke emotion,” said Lindsay Eshelman, co-founder of Confront Art. “It shows the disunification of America that we live in.” 

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George Floyd is seen as one of the faces of social injustice when he tragically died in May 2020 as former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on his neck for almost 10 minutes. After worldwide protests following Floyd’s death, Chauvin was convicted of the murder in April 2021. 

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Floyd, along with Breonna Taylor and John Lewis, were recently honored with bronze busts at Union Square in New York as part of Confront Art’s “SEEINJUSTICE” exhibit. 

“As a result of the death of George Floyd, there came a global awareness and understanding of the plague of injustice across the world,” said artist Chris Carnabuci, who was behind the “SEEINJUSTICE” series, in a statement. “The exhibit represents this global understanding, and from understanding comes action, and from action comes change.”