‘Year 3’: A new exhibition by the Turner Prize winner and film director Steve McQueen
By Sally Farr
This November the Tate Gallery unveils ‘Year 3’, a new exhibition of work by the Turner Prize winner and award-winning film director, Steve McQueen.
An epic photographic project undertaken over the course of a year, it features over 76,000 school children from across the capital, just over 2/3 of the total who were actually invited to be photographed. The project portrays the children through the medium of the traditional class photograph, with rows of children sitting or standing alongside their teachers.
Year 3 is when 7-and 8-year-olds become more conscious of a much bigger world beyond their immediate family and is considered to be a milestone year in a child’s development and sense of identity. Steve McQueen captures this moment of excitement, anticipation and hope, but on the scale of an ambitious visual portrait of citizenship, possibly the largest of its kind ever undertaken, in one of the world’s largest cities.
McQueen, raised in west London, described the work which has gone on display at Tate Britain as a gift to London— to reward the capital which “gives so much back to you”. He found curating his latest exhibition “hugely much more satisfying” than shooting any of his feature films and hopes it will inspire the next generation of artists. He was motivated by looking at his own class photo and his memory of going to the National Portrait Gallery, remembering that the only black people he saw there were the guards. “Art school was my liberation” said McQueen, “where I could achieve my goals and realise myself. That opportunity should be offered up to every single kid and they can go off in whatever direction they want.”
It is a clear and physical statement of the cultural diversity of the capital’s new generation of children, of what it means to be a Londoner, both to the rest of the UK as well as the world. While by contrast, as a nation we are in state of flux about our own national identity as we seek to break away from the EU, in central London for many of them this diversity of culture will be the norm. The project is as much about diversity in people, as about variety of work produced and what opportunities this can create. It raises the issue and importance of this in education, the hope being it would help to promote art education in schools, at a time when the government has pulled back on creativity in the syllabus, and the need for diverse work to be included in art institutions.
“To be a Londoner right now... often as an artist you can be a vessel for something. You are giving this thing over to London, but London is giving so much back to you. It is almost like a conversation. It’s a two-way thing. It’s not about me or the project. It is about us. That is what this project is about. Who we are? I’m the person pushing the button doing it. But it is about us. A few words have been thrown around, like the word diversity - I’m going to vomit. It’s us.” McQueen said.
The project is part of a partnership between the Tate Britain, the arts commissioning organisation Artangel and the creative learning specialists A New Direction. Clarrie Wallis, the exhibition’s curator, said the project was also about “instilling a mindset” in schoolchildren that they could go on to achieve what they wanted. Wallis said Year 3 offered Tate Britain a chance to “champion why creativity matters” and introduce itself to a new generation of children, many of whom had never been to a gallery before.
More than 600 children are expected to visit the gallery each day to see their portraits display in 613 locations on roadsides, railways and underground stations, in the centre and on the outskirts of the capital. This outdoor work is a collaboration with Artangel, known in particularly for producing unusual art in unexpected places.
McQueen said the work would never be sold and the pictures would be sent to the schools at the end of the exhibition—which will run until 3 May 2020 at the Tate Britain. The Art Angel billboards will be displayed until November 18.