Steve McQueen: Sunshine State
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A career-spanning introduction to the award-winning director of Small Axe, with contributions from Paul Gilroy, Hamza Walker and more
Declared by Time "one of the most influential people in the world" in 2014, British filmmaker Steve McQueen (born 1969) first presented his work in galleries and museums in the early 1990s, with installations and films influenced by Warhol and French New Wave. (An early friendship with Okwui Enwezor was also formative.) His first major work was Bear (1993), in which two naked men (one of them McQueen) exchange glances that can be interpreted as either flirtatious or threatening. Today McQueen is best known for award-winning films such as Widows (2018), Twelve Years a Slave (2013), Shame (2011) and Hunger (2008). More recently, he directed the five-part film series Small Axe (2020), about London's Black community and the British Caribbean experience. In 2021, a three-part documentary series, Uprising, Black Power: A British Story of Resistance and Subnormal: A British Scandal (2021) were released as a companion to Small Axe, covering the Civil Rights Movement in the UK.
Published for McQueen's solo exhibition at Pirelli HangarBicocca, this comprehensive survey features several of the artist's most iconic films from the past two decades, as well as an in-depth exploration of his new work. It includes critical texts on McQueen's oeuvre by art historians and curators, among them Paul Gilroy and Solveig Nelson, as well as a conversation between the artist and Hamza Walker.
Paul Gilroy
Paul Gilroy is a historian, writer and cultural theorist and the founding Director of the Centre for the Study of Race and Racism at UCL (2019). Prior to UCL, he taught at South Bank University, Essex University, Goldsmiths, University of London, Yale University, London School of Economics and King's College London. Gilroy is the 2019 winner of the Holberg Prize. He is known for his influential studies on black cultural expression on both sides of the Atlantic; the cultural history of postcolonial societies; and the sociology of ethnicity, race and racism in Britain.
Solveig Nelson
Solveig Nelson is curator of photography and new media at the Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College. She has curated exhibitions including Split Second Misreads: Robert Cumming and the Fabrication of Illusion and the retrospective John Sparagana: Interference Patterns. Her writing has been published in several monographs, including feature essays on David Hartt and Steve McQueen; she contributed to Artforum starting in 2012; and she is the editor of the book Split-Second Misreads. With Robyn Farrell, she co-curated the Art Institute of Chicago's presentation of Gregg Bordowitz: I Wanna Be Well.
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