When Steven Janssen was a young artist, he knew one break is all he’d need to jumpstart his whole career. Today, he strives to be the person he himself needed back then: a gallery owner who takes on up-and-coming artists and spotlights local talent.
A celebrated artist in his own right, his art hangs in the homes of Emmy and Golden Globe winners. But on a Modernism Week visit to Janssen’s sunny downtown gallery, the names he dropped weren’t Jennifer Aniston or Lucy Liu. They were the names of the artists whose work he proudly displays on walls and pedestals, artists whose achievements he discusses with unmistakable admiration: Ron Scharfe, Arron Buttram, Andy Burgess and Robert Webster, to name a few.
Janssen is the owner of Janssen Artspace, the eye-catching jewelbox of a gallery at 255 East Tahquitz Canyon Way. Exhibits within its walls cover a variety of media — from painting and photography to collage, digital art, and ceramics — and all are by artists living and creating in Southern California.
“I love to support local artists, and I’m always looking for new talent,” Janssen says. “I love having that kind of raw vibe — not having the gallery too high-end or too low-end, but just in the middle.”
A native Angeleno, Janssen grew up in Whittier, California. His own artistic journey began, he recalls, at the age of four. “I was obsessed with roller coasters as a kid, and I did these drawings of roller coasters,” he says. “My parents were very supportive, and they bought me one of those plastic paint sets with the cheap, plastic brush. And from there on, I just started painting, whatever I can get my brain to translate onto paper. It was a cool thing to be able to do and not have your parents frown upon you. They were totally supportive.”
But it was his own struggles establishing himself post-grad as an artist that put him on course to found his own gallery. After finishing college at California State University, Long Beach, he worked nights as a bartender in Los Angeles to fund his art career, which freed up his days for painting.
“One day, I was like, ‘You know what? I’m gonna try to submit my work to different galleries,’” Janssen recalls. “It was a whole process, and I was always denied.”
Galleries didn’t want to take a chance on someone green, he says. “You had to have your resume of shows and history of art. And then you would just be like, ‘How am I ever going to excel if I can’t show my work?’ So finally, I’m like, ‘You know what? I’m going to do it myself.’ And I found the space here in Palm Springs in 2006, and here we are.”
Addressing this paradox — artists needing a body of work in order to exhibit in a gallery, but needing exposure at a gallery to build that body of work — has helped form the foundation of Janssen Artspace and its commitment to emerging artists.
That first iteration of Janssen Artspace opened in 2006 and shuttered in 2009, one of the casualties of the Great Recession of the late aughts. In March 2017, with the recession long past and Palm Springs tourism on the upswing, Janssen relaunched his gallery in its current space on East Tahquitz Canyon Way, a pedigreed 1950s building by renowned architect Donald Wexler. But then came the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.
“I thought for sure, ‘It’s like déjà vu. Here we go again,’” Janssen says. “But this time, it was a completely different ballgame, and we celebrate seven years this month.”
As a trusted artist himself, Janssen has built a remarkable rapport with the artists he represents and throughout the community.
“Steven has the ability to attract artists who support each other,” says ceramic artist Kevin Nierman. “It’s like a wonderful family.”
Painter Lynda Keeler echoes those sentiments: “Steven is a rare combination of a gallery owner who understands artists, curates exciting exhibitions and is a very talented artist in his own right.”
Balancing those roles of curator and painter, and the demands of business owner versus artmaker, are something Janssen admits he hasn’t quite mastered, but he’s inching closer toward equilibrium. His gallery is open roughly 10 months a year, with exhibits changing monthly. But during the scorch of summer, he closes up shop, and from mid-July to September, he shifts gears from gallerist to painter. With no sales to make or openings to single-handedly plan, he retreats to the upper level of Janssen Artspace, to his personal studio hidden above the gallery, with killer mountain views, gobs of natural light, plenty of A/C, and no Internet to distract him. And he churns out a year’s worth of paintings while he can, until the next season rolls around.
In season, Janssen rotates work every month, packing the social calendar with inventive new exhibits and energetic openings. These include exhibits like December’s “Small Wonder,” full of “suitcase art” that Palm Springs visitors can easily schlep home in carry-on bags, and February’s “Noir,” an installation of black-and-white works inspired by film noir and the Palm Springs International Film Festival. The current exhibition “Retrospect,” celebrating Desert Modernism and Modernism Week, continues through March 24, then to be replaced with “Kaleidoscope,” which will see Janssen Artspace exploding with spring color March 28 through April 28.
While Janssen and his husband still split their time between Palm Springs and their Los Feliz home in L.A., he expects they’ll be year-round desert dwellers in the near future.
“I’d been coming out here for years because I have grandparents, uncles and aunts here, and growing up in L.A., it’s just a hop, skip and a jump. We’d come out here all the time, so it was always a second home,” Janssen says. “And then I met my partner, Stephen Huvane, and he’s like, ‘I’m thinking about buying a house in Palm Springs. Do you like Palm Springs?’ I’m like, ‘I love Palm Springs!’ … So that’s how I ended up here, and I think we’re going to be out here full time very soon.”
“There’s something spiritually happening in these little pockets of Palm Springs,” he says. “There’s something in this little vortex that you can’t find anywhere else.”
Visit his website: janssenartspace.com
