Steve McQueen Is an Art Doer

The artist had been making the commute from the city to the museum each day, five hours of driving in all. “This trip has been work—W-O-R-K, in capitals,” he said. On Monday, his “day off,” he took meetings at the Dia in Chelsea, where he will have a follow-up show in September. That exhibit will include “Sunshine State,” a video piece that combines footage of the surface of the sun with McQueen relating a violent encounter that his father, Philbert, experienced as a migrant fruit picker in Florida in the nineteen-fifties. The work, which has been shown across Europe, has appeared in the U.S. only once before. “It was shown in L.A.,” he said. He dropped his voice to a stage whisper: “Does that count?”