George Floyd statue defaced 2 days after unveiling in NYC

NEW YORK – In Union Square on Friday night, Terrence Floyd — a brother of George Floyd — spoke softly into a microphone.

"These monuments have meaning," Floyd said as he stood among large sculptures of his brother, Rep. John Lewis and Breonna Taylor.

The statues were covered in black cloth, and the growing crowd of people held cellphone cameras, ready to capture the moment when Floyd and others revealed the sculptures, which are nearly 6 feet tall.

In that moment, there were no signs, no pain-filled chants and no gas masks — dramatically different from a little more than a year ago, when Union Square was often a central location for nights of protest. With the sculptures, a site of unrest became a place to reflect.

But two days later, around 10:15 a.m. on Sunday, a man with a black backpack rode a skateboard up to the George Floyd statue and splashed the face with gray paint. Police said the incident was caught on surveillance video.

"It's incredibly disappointing how the statues were defaced in such a short amount of time, and it just goes to show you how far we still have to go to reach our goal of unity," Terrence Floyd said Sunday in a joint statement with the nonprofit We Are Floyd Foundation.

Artist Chris Carnabuci, who made the sculptures, said Sunday that while the vandalism was not a complete surprise, "it is quite upsetting to us all." He said the exhibit aimed to inspire civil discourse and provide a space where different opinions could be heard.

Union Square is the latest stop for the George Floyd sculpture, which spent a couple of weeks on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn over the summer. Less than a week after its unveiling in Brooklyn, it was defaced with the logo of a white supremacist group.

In an earlier interview, Carnabuci, 57, said he had decided to paint it and the other statues so if someone tried to deface them again, they would be easier to restore.

He also explained why he had chosen Union Square as the backdrop for the installation, called "#SeeInjustice," which will be on display until Oct. 30.

"It has this storied history of — we'll call it protesting or social gatherings," he said. "There was a George Floyd protest at Union Square. Back in the late 1800s, there were protests that went on there. It's gone on for over 100 years."

The killing last year of Floyd, 46, by Derek Chauvin, a white Minneapolis police officer who was subsequently fired and convicted of murder, inspired Carnabuci.

"We actually started thinking about making an exhibition and bringing the pieces around to sort of keep the awareness up," he said. "And even raise some money for foundations that are geared toward those in need."

Carnabuci worked with Andrew Cohen and Lindsay Eshelman, founders of Confront Art, an organization that aims to connect artists with social justice causes to create public art.