Meet Marcus Jansen

We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Marcus Jansen a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Marcus, thanks for sharing your insights with our community today. Part of your success, no doubt, is due to your work ethic and so we’d love if you could open up about where you got your work ethic from?

That is a Multifacet question, since I believe it comes from a multitude of avenues. First, I think it is somewhat of a survival mechanism, a constant need to search and find that comes with endless curiously and the wiliness to be obsessed with something that one loves or is passionate about to fill that quest. It may also be part of a fight and flight response in which one chooses to fight and live which then translates into work ethic. Either way, it is an essential need to be productive and leave something more permanent.

Thanks, so before we move on maybe you can share a bit more about yourself?

I am perhaps best known for my defaced “Faceless” portraits and gestural-provoking landscapes with art studios based in Bronx, New York, and Fort Myers, Florida.​ For the last four decades, with my early professional beginnings in 1999, I was part of an artist group of individuals referred to as “Prince Street Kings,” artists typically setting up in lower Manhattan selling art works from the corner of Prince Street and Broadway in New York City. I typically present my audience with a mirror of society and reexamine and questioning our visual history from a 21st century’s perspective while disrupting one perspective story’s being told.

My first U.S. solo museum show highlighted my work at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in 2018 and 2019, titled “Deconstructing Marcus Jansen,” followed by a first U.S. solo Museum exhibitions, at the Rollins Museum of Art, in Winter Park, Florida, titled, “Marcus Jansen, E Pluribus Unum.,” and The Baker Museum Artis-Naples, in Naples, Florida, titled “Marcus Jansen, Two Decades of Relevance.”
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My public collections include The Bronx Museum of the Arts, The Baker Museum, The Moscow Museum of Modern Art, (MMOMA), The New Britain Museum of American Art, The Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, The Rollins Museum of Art, The University of Michigan Museum of Art, The Foundation Calosa, The PERMM Museum of Contemporary Art, The National Taiwan Museum of Fine Art and The Housatonic Museum of Art.​ I’ve been fortunate enough to work with Companies such as Warner Brothers, Ford Motor Company FIFA and Absolut Vodka in the past.

More can be found on Instagram: @marcusjansenofficial

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?

I would say the three qualities that were and continue to be essential are: 1. being a survivor or having a survivor mindset helps, 2. Overcoming any challenges and turning them in to opportunities 3. believing in yourself and what you do and being original. The best way to stay on track of your passion is to first find one, dream and then manifest your dream into action. No one will do it for you. Assemble likeminded people around you that you trust which is an essential environment one must have. In addition, one must feel like needing to do it, not just wanting to do it to reach heights that others do not. But also understanding that your successes are is in the daily little things like getting by every day and being fortunate to do what you love is a success,

Okay, so before we go, is there anyone you’d like to shoutout for the role they’ve played in helping you develop the essential skills or overcome challenges along the way?

My wife first and foremost, followed by my children and the drive to feed them and build a life for them. Immediately following them, i would say my closest inner circle of family then friends and business partners that saw my talent early as well as later in my career. Having a family of people that believe in what you are doing is essential as well as building a network of people who are there when you fall, and you will always fall but getting up is what makes the difference. There is nothing more valuable on earth than family and friends.

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