Q&A Interview with artist Marcus Jansen and Terrence Sanders - Smith, New Orleans.

SMITH Contemporary in New Orleans, features TWO DECADES 2000-2019 editions opens, Nov.1.-Nov.29.2025 and focuses on Marcus Jansens’s Modern Expressionism period.

“Marcus Jansen’s work brings you into an interpretation of yourself. Its depth makes you aware of your accountability as a human, a witness. What makes this series so important, valuable and impactful is his courage and fearlessness to speak truth to power. As a curator this series of work from Marcus Jansen opened a lens into analyzing so many difficult moments in a not to distant history.” -Terrence Sanders-Smith

Note: Modern Expressionism is an art movement and style that focuses on expressing emotional experience rather than physical reality.

"They gave me the feeling of seeing paintings that had leaped 100 to 150 years from the American style of the Ashcan school, i.e., Edward Hopper’s midnight pictures bathed in yellow light of a few patrons in a diner, very poetic. Marcus is the innovator of Modern Expressionism. What initiated it for him, was the graffiti on the sides of subway trains when he traveled from the Bronx to Manhattan to sell his work on the street. This is somewhat reminiscent of Jackson Pollock learning to kneel with the Hopi Indians and throw sand to make sand pictures. That innovation may have been the beginning of Abstract Expressionism."

Jerome A. Donson - Art Historian and Former director of The American Vanguard Exhibitions, MOMA, New York, 1961.