Steve Marcus (aka smarcus) has been a fixture of NYC’s Lower East Side for a more than a quarter century, creating artwork for popular and unpopular culture. Spanning, print, fashion, music, film and animation, his works have been experienced by millions.
He has collaborated with Allen Ginsberg, Ken Kesey, Timothy Leary, The Miguel Pinero Estate and created artwork and illustrations for High Times Magazine and the infamous Cannabis Cup, Esquire, ArtForum, Random House, Conde Nast Publications, and the renowned Fillmore Theater in San Francisco. Marcus’ animations were featured in Watson Guptil’s coffee table book Flash Frames, showcasing the pioneers of flash animation while his mind-bending visuals for The Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Californication Tour and were shown at Radio City Music Hall during the MTV Music Awards, as well as during the opening of the Experimental Music Project Museum. His animated short film Three Thug Mice (2008-2009), a street legend classic that features voice acting by more than 80 cult celebrities and captured a global underground audience, was officially selected for 12 international film festivals, winning seven “Best” awards in diverse categories.
Marcus has received honors and awards from the American Society of Illustrators; and has several works in the permanent collection of the Oakland Museum of California and in private art collections in the United States and Israel. He has been recognized as one of the 500 most influential outsiders in The United States by Future 500; and is honored to have created a hand drawn stained glass panel installed in the Aron Ha’Kodesh in the Beit Medresh at Reb Moshe Feinstein z’l world renowned Lower East Side Yeshiva, Mesivta Tifereth Jerusalem in 2013.
Mailer, Buber, and the Society
The Society introduced Marcus to its members in August 2017, ahead of the conference in Sarasota that October. He had made a series of thirteen limited-edition giclée prints, 20 by 16 inches, inspired by Mailer’s commentary on Martin Buber’s Tales of the Hasidim in Commentary—among them “The Premise,” “The Desert,” “The Burden,” “Vanity of Vanities,” “Upsetting the Bowl,” and “On the Day of Destruction” (Mailer in the News, 2017). The Society’s notices of the prints point to the June 1963 issue. Mailer’s commentary ran as a column, “Responses and Reactions,” in six installments from December 1962 to October 1963, given mainly to Buber’s tales, and was reprinted, in whole or in part, in The Presidential Papers (Works and Days). Marcus offered the prints to conference-goers at a discount and gave ten percent of the sales made before or during the conference to the Society.
At the conference itself he read a paper, “Martin, Norman and Me (Mailer and Buber),” on a panel moderated by Victor Peppard (2017 program). The next year, in Macon, he spoke on “Mailer’s Judaica Library” in a session on Mailer and Judaism with Mashey Bernstein, moderated by Mike Lennon (2018 program). His biography in that program, under the name Steven Marcus, added the Norman Mailer Estate to the list of his collaborators. He is not the critic Steven Marcus (1928–2018), whose Paris Review interview with Mailer, recorded in 1963, Lennon counted among Mailer’s most important (Works and Days).
The same year his illustrations accompanied excerpts from Richard Stratton’s Smuggler’s Blues and Kingpin in Provincetown Arts (2018), whose contributor note announced a solo exhibition at the Jewish Museum of Florida in Miami Beach for the spring of 2019.
In Works and Days
- “Responses and Reactions I” (Commentary, December 1962), the first of Mailer’s six columns on Buber’s Tales of the Hasidim
- “Responses and Reactions IV” (Commentary, June 1963)
- The Presidential Papers (1963), which reprints the columns
- Allen Ginsberg, one of Marcus’s collaborators