Two Steve McQueen Exhibitions in London Show His Commitment to the Ostracized, the Ignored, and the Colonized

In the past two decades, artist-filmmaker Steve McQueen has achieved Hollywood success with movies that draw on the spirit of video art—a rare feat. His Academy Award-winning 12 Years a Slave (2013) was an adaptation of the 1853 memoir of Solomon Northrup—a freeborn man who, in his thirties, was kidnapped and sold into slavery—that employed disjointed editing schemes and overlapping sound design, stylistic devices associated more with experimental film than with mains