Steve McQueen on his art and why museums matter
As the artist and filmmaker’s Grenfell installation begins a UK tour with Art Fund support, he discusses childhood, history, community and the vital role of museums in all our lives.
A version of this article first appeared in the spring 2025 issue of Art Quarterly, the membership magazine of Art Fund.
Who is Steve McQueen?
Born in London in 1969, Steve McQueen tells important, often overlooked stories and histories in ways that can be poetic, intimate and uncompromising.
His self-funded short film Grenfell, created using footage of the burnt-out Grenfell Tower and shot from a helicopter six months after the fire of 14 June 2017, is dedicated to the 72 people who lost their lives as a result of it, the survivors and the bereaved.
He is the only artist to have been awarded at the highest level internationally for his work in both art and film, including winning the Turner Prize in 1999, showing in the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2009 and winning an Oscar for Best Motion Picture for 12 Years a Slave in 2014.
His latest feature film, Blitz, was released in November last year.
Jenny Waldman: Ensuring that all young people can visit and enjoy museums and galleries is very much part of Art Fund’s mission in promoting the National Art Pass and Teacher Art Pass memberships. What were your early formative experiences of museums?
Steve McQueen: Museums, for me, early on, were places of discovery and wonder. They were one of those spaces that I would have never got to go, because they weren’t on my radar. The fact that schools facilitated going into these spaces of learning – and that it was a day out, so it was made to be special and important –had a huge effect on me, which lasts to this day.
JW: How did your own childhood feed into your 2019 Year 3 project, which displayed class portraits of nearly every London schoolchild in Year 3 (aged between seven and eight) at Tate Britain in London?
SMcQ: Year 3 emerged from my own experience of being part of the school system. The project became a vast portrait of London’s identity through its children – over 3,000 photographs were displayed at Tate Britain, and also on billboards across the city.
I wanted viewers to reflect on their own journey from childhood: even for children shown at age seven, these photographs reveal how uneven the playing field already is. For example, you can see the disparities in resources, opportunities and circumstances that will shape these young lives. And, of course, it’s children looking at themselves. Within the context of Tate Britain, all these photographs displayed together was showing them that they are part of a community, part of a bigger, broader world.
JW: You have talked about that project as being about seeing the future in the present. What did you mean by that?
SMcQ: It was meant quite literally. You walked into Tate Britain and, as you saw all these photographs on the walls, you were seeing the future of London within them. It was the only space and place that you could physically, actually do that – see that future, and see that it was brown, black and white.
JW: Your work is held in many public institutions. What is the importance to you of having your work in public collections?
SMcQ: It’s the whole idea of the public owning it, that it’s theirs. I think it’s the fact that it is of public service and not just for the museum. The artworks are for the community and they’re part of the community, and there’s an ownership of them and an entitlement to them by the viewer.
JW: You move very fluidly and with great critical success between fine art, photography and moving image – in mainstream cinema, drama and documentary. What is the main linking thread between all those media for you?
SMcQ: It’s about the truth, and trying to do one’s best within the means that you have.
JW: Violence, conflict and their consequences have been a presence in many of your works, including two which Art Fund supported the acquisition of: your short film Ashes, acquired for the Whitworth, Manchester, in 2016, and Queen and Country (2007), acquired for IWM. Can you talk about what those two very different works are and how they came about?
SMcQ: Ashes was a film that came about through me being in Grenada. I was there shooting another project, and there was a beautiful man called Ashes, and I wanted to film him. There was a kind of instinct about it for me, I needed to film him. The cinematographer Robby Müller and I went out on a boat to shoot the film, not knowing that three months later Ashes would be murdered.
Queen and Country came about from me being the official war artist for Iraq. I was commissioned by the IWM, the Imperial War Museum, to spend time with the troops and make an artwork about the Iraq War. It was very intimate and very personal. When I was there, I thought of war letters – and the idea of people receiving a letter from one of the troops. Having portraits of British service personnel who had died during the war in the form of postage stamps that you put on a letter, was a tactile, personal memorial to the lives and sacrifice of those people.
JW: Your feature film Blitz tells the story of a child caught up in the chaos of evacuation during the Second World War. What draws you to these narratives?
SMcQ: I’m interested in history and how we arrived here. We didn’t arrive by a stork, gently landing us in our mother’s lap. We got here, unfortunately, through conflict and war and other things, and that’s what I’m interested in.
JW: The exhibition ‘Resistance’, recently opened at Turner Contemporary in Margate, which you have co-curated, looks at the history of resistance in Britain through 100 years of photography (from 1903 to 2003). How did you choose both the events to show and the particular photographers who captured them?
SMcQ: That was a hard undertaking – it was a four-year project. We had some special advisers, including Gary Younge, Vron Ware and Paul Gilroy, who helped guide us. But it took a lot of research to focus in on the people and the photographs and the stories we wanted to tell. It was painstaking, and myself, [co-curator] Clarrie Wallis and others went through thousands of images to build the best exhibition we could.
JW: What do you think that the exhibition is saying to us about the British spirit of protest and collective action?
SMcQ: It’s saying that it’s very much alive, and that it is one of the things that has definitely shaped us. The whole idea of us challenging the status quo, not just accepting what’s been given – that has helped our democracy to be healthy, and, hopefully, it will continue to do so. The more we protest, the more we ask questions, the more democracy becomes healthier.
JW: You prefer not to speak directly about your very powerful short film Grenfell so that the attention remains on the tragedy and the campaign for justice. But would you like to say anything about the tour, coordinated by Tate, which will be taking the film to public art institutions across the UK and is free to visit?
SMcQ: The fire was a national tragedy and shame, and the idea of a tour of the film, so that people all over the country can view the work, is what is important to me.
JW: What role do you think museums play in fostering these important societal discussions, and are there ways that they could evolve to become even more effective platforms for this?
SMcQ: Museums are vital because they’re out there and they’re vital because they are a curated point of view, and one that can create debate and discussion. Museums are places of gathering, and they’re places of community and importance, and we have to keep on supporting those spaces – not just through attendance, but through creating exhibitions that people want to see.
‘Grenfell’, Chapter, Cardiff, 10 May to 15 June; the MAC, Belfast, 17 July to 21 September; the Box, Plymouth, Tate Liverpool and MAC, Birmingham, 2026-27.
‘Resistance’, Turner Contemporary, Margate, to 1 June. Free to all, 10% off in shop with National Art Pass .
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