Photo: James Stopforth, Courtesy of Thomas Dane Gallery and Marian Goodman Gallery
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.
Free parking for all six Norton Lectures is available at the Broadway Garage, located at 7 Felton Street, between Broadway and Cambridge Streets. Parking is from one hour pre-performance to one hour post. More info at Parking & Directions.
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.
Meshell Ndegeocello is an American singer-songwriter, poet, and bassist. Her music incorporates a wide variety of influences, including funk, soul, jazz, hip hop, reggae and rock. She has received significant critical acclaim throughout her career, being nominated for 13 Grammy Awards, and winning three. She also has been credited for helping to "spark the neo-soul movement".
Donna De Salvo is a curator, writer, and consultant who has worked with numerous national and international artists and museum collections. She is currently Senior Adjunct Curator, Special Projects, Dia Art Foundation, and amongst other projects, is co-curating, with Matilde Guidelli Guidi, a major presentation of the work of Jack Whitten. She held several positions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, becoming its first Chief Curator and Deputy Director for Programs where she oversaw the museum’s curatorial department and program of exhibitions and acquisitions, and was centrally involved in the development and design of the Whitney’s new building and exhibition galleries. She led the team for its inaugural exhibition, America Is Hard to See, and in 2018-19, curated the Whitney’s widely-acclaimed retrospective, Andy Warhol—From A to B and Back Again. Known for her thematic exhibitions, such as Open Systems: Rethinking Art c. 1970 (Tate Modern); Hand-Painted Pop: American Art in Transition (1955-1962) (LAMoCA) and A Museum Looks at Itself (The Parrish Art Museum), Ms. De Salvo has also organized exhibitions or commissioned the work of Barbara Bloom, John Chamberlain, Roni Horn, Anish Kapoor, Barbara Kruger, Steve McQueen, Barnett Newman, Hélio Oiticica, Ed Ruscha, Cy Twombly, Lawrence Weiner, and Joe Zucker, amongst many others. Ms. De Salvo has held curatorial positions at Tate Modern, London; the Wexner Center in Columbus, Ohio; Dia Art Foundation, in New York; and the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. In the 1990s, she was the Robert Lehman Curator at The Parrish Art Museum, where she organized numerous exhibitions, including an installation on Job’s Lane of the work of Maren Hassinger.
Noam M. Elcott is Associate Professor for the history of modern art at Columbia. Elcott is the author of the award-winning book Artificial Darkness: An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media (University of Chicago Press, 2016), as well as essays on art and media from the 19th century to the present, published in leading journals, anthologies, and exhibition catalogues. He co-directed The August Sander Project (MoMA/Columbia, 2016-2021), co-edited a special issue of Grey Room on “Art Beyond Copyright” (2024), and is a principal investigator of the Data Science Institute grant on “Art Images and AI: Latent Space Interpretability, Art History, and the Law.” His current book projects are The Social Status Portrait: August Sander’s People of the Twentieth Century and Art™: A History of Modern Art, Authenticity, and Trademarks.
Michael Veal is Henry L. and Lucy G. Moses Professor of Music at Yale University, where he has taught ethnomusicology and other topics since 1998. A self-described "musical pan-Africanist" with interests in technology, politics, and the interrelationship between the arts, Professor Veal is the author of three books: Fela The Life and Times of an African Musical Icon (2000), Dub: Soundscapes and Shattered Songs in Jamaican Reggae (2007), and Living Space: John Coltrane, Miles Davis and Free Jazz, from Analog to Digital (2024). He is also an electric bassist and soprano saxophonist and leader of the ensembles Michael Veal and Aqua Ife and Michael Veal's Armillary Sphere.
Jennifer Roberts, Drew Gilpin Faust Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University
The Charles Eliot Norton Professorship in Poetry was endowed in 1925. Harvard’s preeminent lecture series in the arts and humanities, the Norton Lectures recognize individuals of extraordinary talent who, in addition to their particular expertise, have the gift of wide dissemination and wise expression. The term “poetry” is interpreted in the broadest sense to encompass all poetic expression in language, music, or the fine arts.
LOCATION:Sanders Theatre STATUS:CONFIRMED DTSTART:20251106T230000Z DTEND:20251107T003000Z END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR