Event details
Saturday, January 25, 2025
12–3:30 pm

Dia Beacon
3 Beekman Street
Beacon, New York

Free with museum admission.

Convened in conjunction with the presentation of Steve McQueen’s Bass (2024) at Dia Beacon, this symposium brings together artists and scholars to reflect on the work’s aesthetic and political resonances. Invited speakers Solveig Nelson, Michael E. Veal, and Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa will address the immersive installation through ideas of image-making and abstraction, music and reverberation, and representations of Black life and culture, while situating it in the context of McQueen’s past works. Afterward, writer Zoë Hopkins will moderate a group discussion between the speakers.

Visitors are encouraged to arrive to the museum early to experience Bass before the program begins.

For more than 30 years, McQueen has investigated the possibilities inherent in film—as a material, documentary tool, and storytelling medium—resulting in work that is formally inventive and politically pointed. With no representational or moving-image component, Bass is an environment comprising the most basic, structural elements of film: light and sound.

Schedule
12–1:15 pm Session I: Introduction by Donna De Salvo, senior adjunct curator, special projects, followed by individual presentations
2–3:30 pm Session II: Moderated group discussion and audience Q&A

Solveig Nelson is a curator, scholar, and art critic whose work focuses on the intersections between video, photography, and social movements. She received a PhD from the Art Institute of Chicago and was the American Council of Learned Societies Emerging Voices Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Art History at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. She currently is the curator of photography and new media at the Benton Museum in Pomona, California.

Michael E. Veal is a bassist, writer, and scholar of the cultural sphere of the Black Atlantic, with a focus on African and African American music. A “musical pan-Africanist,” he has taught at Yale University, New Haven, since 1998; he is currently the Henry L. and Lucy G. Moses Professor in the Department of Music as well as a Professor of African American and American Studies.

Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa is a photographer, curator, and writer who has exhibited and published his work widely. Recent publications include the essay selection Dark Mirrors (2021) and Indeterminacy: Thoughts on Time, the Image, and Race(ism) (2022). His recent exhibition Scene at Eastman opened at George Eastman Museum, Rochester, in October 2024. He is also an educator and was previously the director of the Photography MFA program at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence.

Zoë Hopkins is a writer and critic focused on Conceptual art of the Black diaspora. Her writing has been featured in Artforum, Cultured, Hyperallergic, and The Brooklyn Rail. She is currently pursuing an MA in modern and contemporary art at Columbia University, New York.