The Norton Lectures with Steve McQueen: Pulse | Lecture One: "End Credits"

THE NORTON LECTURES

2025-26 Norton Professor of Poetry: Steve McQueen

Featured Performers: Regina Reagan, Jeff Mash, Eric Meyers, and Laurel Lefkow

Discussant: Donna De Salvo, Dia Art Foundation

Moderator: Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Harvard University

The 2025-26 Norton Lectures | Steve McQueen: Pulse

Norton Lecture One: End Credits

Centering on the FBI files of legendary African American singer and political activist Paul Robeson, Steve McQueen’s video work End Credits (2012-2022) features a continuous projection of digitally scanned files from the thousands of declassified, though highly redacted, documents kept on Robeson and his wife, Eslanda Goode Robeson. Beginning in 1941, this relentless scrutiny continued throughout Robeson’s life, all but ending his career as a performer. The video is accompanied by audio of performers reading from the files, but the narration is out-of-sync with what is projected onscreen. The discrepancy between sight and sound generates a continuous disconnect that points to the absurdity of this politically and racially motivated surveillance.    

Four performers will read sections from Robeson’s FBI files while visuals from End Credits are screened behind them.  The one-hour performance will be followed by a conversation with McQueen and Donna De Salvo, Senior Adjunct Curator, Dia Art Foundation, who curated a presentation of the work at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2016, moderated by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research.  

This is the first of six Norton Lectures with Steve McQueen. For all Lecture dates and information, click here.

Admission is FREE; tickets are required. Tickets can be obtained through the Harvard Box Office. Seating is first come, first served. Limit of four tickets per person. Tickets valid until 5:45pm.

Tickets will be available in advance one week prior to each lecture starting at noon online, in person at the Smith Campus Center box office, or by phone. Handling fees apply for online and phone sales. Tickets also available in person at Sanders Theatre starting two hours prior to each lecture, subject to availability.

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.

About the Speakers

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.

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.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University. Emmy, DuPont, and Peabody Award-winning filmmaker, literary scholar, cultural critic, and institution builder, Professor Gates has published numerous books and produced and hosted an array of documentary films, including The Black Church (PBS), Frederick Douglass: In Five Speeches (HBO), Gospel (PBS), and Great Migrations (PBS). Finding Your Roots, Gates’s groundbreaking genealogy and genetics series, now in its eleventh season on PBS, was nominated for a Primetime Emmy (2024).  His latest book is The Black Box: Writing the Race (Penguin Random House, 2024), named by The New York Sunday Times Book Review as one the “100 Best Books of the Year.” He is at work on a new series exploring “The History of Blacks and Jews.” Gates is a recipient of numerous honorary degrees, including most recently, one from his graduate alma mater, the University of Cambridge, and The London School of Economics. Gates was a member of the first class awarded “genius grants” by the MacArthur Foundation in 1981, and in 1998 he became the first African American scholar to be awarded the National Humanities Medal, conferred by President William Jefferson Clinton. In 2001 he discovered the first novel written by a Black female author, The Bondwoman’s Narrative, by Hannah Craft, the holograph manuscript of which he donated to Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book Library.

About the Norton Lectures

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.