Multidisciplinary artist Martellus “Marty” Bennett, lately of the Houston Freedmen’s Town Conservancy and Contemporary Arts Museum Houston collaborative installation Bennett Road, recently completed yet another impressive achievement: He overhauled his website.

“I made it for coffee. So if there’s a Saturday or a Sunday, you get your coffee, it’s the website that you could sit down and spend time with,” he says.

As the creative mastermind behind MR. TOMONOSHi, Bennett has now archived his extensive portfolio of illustrations, animations, games, books (including audiobooks), photography, films, industrial design, yakisugi (a form of Japanese sculpture using charred wood as the medium), fashion design, and writing, as well as case studies and lesson plans for educators. One could easily spend an entire day browsing his website with the same keen eye and inquisitiveness spent at an art museum, but with the bonus of a hot beverage and pajamas.

MR. TOMONOSHi isn’t a brand. Or a character. Or an idea. Or Bennett himself. Or, rather, it is, but in the sense that it’s all of the above and more.

“I think now I’m at a place where I just am. In order to be, you must become. In order to become, you must be, and in order to be, you must start being. I’m just being MR. TOMONOSHi,” Bennett says. “This is what I wear. This is what I listen to. This is how I move. These are the songs I want to write. So I think that that’s kind of like the whole idea of MR. TOMONOSHi and myself in it. And I think of it as me playing in my own imagination with others in both the real world and my imaginative world.”

He describes his current life as “very Zen.” A trip across Japan inspired him to retire from the NFL in 2018 after 10 seasons, five teams including the Dallas Cowboys and the New England Patriots, and a Super Bowl win. He bonded with his tour guide, Miho, with whom he still shares a friendship today. Every day, she wakes up at 4:30 in the morning. She loves to sleep because it means she’ll wake up—and she loves waking up, because it means she gets to re-experience life for yet another day. This, she told Bennett, is her secret to being such a happy person. Among the Shinto shrines, he reflected on her advice and what would lead him to a life where both his sleeping and waking hours were full of wonder and joy.

And that’s when he had his epiphany, the one that moved his life from the stadium grounds to the playgrounds.

“Making stuff. Man, that’s the one thing that I would do no matter what. I look forward to meeting people making stuff. I love making stuff. I like talking about making stuff. I just love making stuff,” Bennett says. “Nothing in particular that I love making more than the other thing. I just love the act of making and what happens when I make things.”

MR. TOMONOSHi was born of this revelation. Inspired by one of the Japanese words for friend, tomodachi, this new chapter offered Bennett a chance to remold his life into the one he envisioned for himself while on his travels. All of his creative philosophies are embodied in the MR. TOMONOSHi experience. And it is an experience. One can’t passively consume any aspect of Bennett’s prodigious output. This is obviously true of Bennett Road, designed specifically as an immersive space, the Field Day: Recess Reimagined event at Discovery Green in March 2025, and his children’s books like Dear Black Boy and the series Hey A.J.

Everything Bennett creates comes from his limitless curiosity. He’s traveled the world, and his library overflows with books on topics as varied as ikebana (Japanese-style flower arranging) and Pixar movies. Conversations with him can gleefully bounce from Tim Burton’s preoccupations with German Expressionism to Hello Kitty to how American culture is Black culture to kickball to the Hung Hsien retrospective at Asia Society. And back around again. His influences, and his desire to dig deeply into them to explore his own creative voice, are proudly infused into the final results. Viewers all become active participants in the work because it explicitly invites everyone to join Bennett in his journey.

Take his yakisugi vases, for example. If placed in a familiar gallery or museum context, they can’t simply be registered as interesting vessels before moving on to the next exhibit. Their burned, blistering exteriors lead to thoughts on how Bennett accomplished that with such precision. From there, what inspired him to work with the technique. And a visit to his website, just as much a manifesto as portfolio, chronicles his own path toward learning about yakisugi, what he learned about himself, and how this becomes physically manifest in an art object. We become just as enraptured by the world as he is, seeing things through his eyes but with an entreaty for us to seek answers on our own.

“I think there’s a crisis of imagination… When you’re outside with friends and there’s nothing that occupies the space…since we live through devices and phones, then the imagination that we seek is supposed to be delivered on the phone to us,” Bennett says. “And then when we want to deliver imagination to others, we post it on the phone as well.”

As prolific as he is, he always has something exciting in the works. On Juneteenth, he released a hip-hop and spoken word album on the contradictions inherent to spirituality. He’s also working on an animated series for Disney, where he and his daughter Jett voice two of the lead characters.

Above all else, MR. TOMONOSHi is just plain fun. While Bennett asks us to think long and hard about what we’re looking at or listening to, he also wants us to do so with a strong sense of play and community, to find all the beautiful things about this weird and wonderful and not-so-little world we all occupy. And to do so as his beloved companions on the diverging roads ahead.

“My life is an art piece, and I’m performing my way through it. And the performance is real. It’s based in reality,” Bennett says. “Even when I draw MR. TOMONOSHi, he wears the same clothes that I wear. I don’t draw outside of myself or things like that. It’s how I see myself in my own imagination.”