The British filmmaker and artist Steve McQueen is this year’s winner of the Erasmus Prize, given annually by the Praemium Erasmianum Foundation, a Dutch cultural institution. The award comes with a 150,000 euro (about $172,000) cash prize plus “adornments”—in this case, a folded paper booklet printed with text in the 16th century Dutch scholar Desiderius Erasmus’s script.
As an artist, McQueen is best known for films like Occupied City (2023), a four-and-a-half-hour-long documentary about Amsterdam during the Holocaust; Ashes (2015), which was cut from footage McQueen shot of a man on a fishing boat in Grenada in 2002; and Static (2009), a view of the Statue of Liberty shot from a circling helicopter. He also directed the feature-length film 12 Years A Slave (2013), which won the Academy Award for Best Picture. More recently, McQueen has turned from moving image to sound and light works, as in his 2024 installation Bass at Dia:Beacon in New York.
The Erasmus Prize is not specifically intended for an artist. Instead, it’s given to “a person or institution that has made an exceptional contribution to the humanities, the social sciences or the arts, in Europe and beyond,” according to press materials.
Previous winners have included the South African writer, comedian, and television host Trevor Noah (2023); the American writer and social activist Barbara Ehrenreich (2018); and the Italian architect Renzo Piano (1995). It was first awarded in 1958 to the Austrian people. Other non-individual winners include Wikipedia (2015), the International Commission of Jurists (1989), and Amnesty International (1976).
Each year, the Erasmus Prize has a different theme, some more straightforward than others. For McQueen, it was “Ecce Homo, Behold the Human Being.” When the English artist Grayson Perry won in 2021, it was “The power of the image in the digital era.” Other visual artists won for themes like “Photo and Document” (Bernd and Hilla Becher, 2002), “Sculpture” (Henry Moore, 1968), and “Painting” (Marc Chagall and Sigmar Polke, in 1960 and 1994, respectively).
“In a world marked by polarization and inequality,” the Praemium Erasmianum Foundation wrote, “McQueen’s work asks us to look carefully and without prejudice—ecce homo—and to recognize ourselves in others.
