2025-26 Norton Professor of Poetry: Steve McQueen

Featured Performer: Meshell Ndegeocello, Musician & Poet

Discussants: Michael E. Veal, Yale University; Noam M. Elcott, Columbia University

Moderator: Donna De Salvo, Dia Art Foundation

The 2025-26 Norton Lectures | Steve McQueen: Pulse

Norton Lecture Three: Bass

Commissioned by the Dia Art Foundation and Laurenz Foundation, Schaulager, Basel, Bass (2024) is an immersive installation comprised of the most basic structural elements of film—light and sound—that upends our perception of space, time, and ourselves. Focused on the titular instrument of the bass, the work features sound created by an intergenerational group of Afrodiasporic musicians who worked together to bring this low-end frequency that typically operates in the background to the foreground. Coupled with deeply saturated overhead lights that cycle through the full spectrum of visible color, through this work McQueen essentially sculpts with light and sound. Inspired in part by the Middle Passage and the transatlantic journey of the enslaved, Bass offers a journey through past and present, or, as the artist describes it, “[puts] the public in a situation where everyone becomes acutely sensitive to themselves.”

Renowned bassist, singer-songwriter, and poet, Meshell Ndegeocello, one of the five contributors to the soundtrack for Bass, will perform. Following the performance, McQueen will be in dialogue with one of the curators of Bass, Donna De Salvo, Senior Adjunct Curator, Dia Art Foundation, Noam M. Elcott, Associate Professor of Art History and Archaeology, Columbia University, and Michael E. Veal, author, musician, and the Henry L. and Lucy G. Moses Professor of Ethnomusicology in the Department of Music at Yale University, to discuss the work’s sonic component and use of spectrum color.

This is the third of six Norton Lectures with Steve McQueen. For all Lecture dates and information, click here.

Steve McQueen is recognized internationally as one of the most important artists of his generation. His work explores universal themes, often addressing painful and challenging histories and exposing the fragility of the human condition.

Awarded the Turner Prize in 1999, McQueen has had his artwork presented at some of the most significant venues and museums around the world. His work has been featured in Documenta, he represented Great Britain at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009, and was selected several times for the Venice Biennale’s central pavilion. Solo exhibitions of his work have been held at the Art Institute of Chicago; Schaulager, Basel; Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. In 2019 he presented YEAR 3 at Tate Britain and had a major solo exhibition at Tate Modern in 2020 which toured to Pirelli Hangar Bicocca, Milan in 2022. In Spring 2023, he presented Grenfell at the Serpentine South Gallery, London. In 2024 McQueen unveiled a new installation, Bass, co-commissioned by Dia and Schaulager Basel, at Dia Beacon in New York.

McQueen has directed four feature films. His first, Hunger (2008), was awarded the Caméra d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and his third, 12 Years a Slave (2013), received the Golden Globe, Oscar, and BAFTA awards for best picture in 2014. In 2020, he made Small Axe, an anthology of five films about London’s West Indian community and, in 2021, Uprising, a 3-part documentary with James Rogan, about the New Cross Fire in London in 1981. His documentary film, Occupied City, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2023. Blitz, his most recent feature, about the Second World War, had its world premiere as the opening film of the 68th BFI London Film Festival.