Note: Soul Sessions is produced as a podcast first and designed to be listened to. If you are able, we strongly encourage you to listen to the audio, which includes the emotion and inflection meant to be conveyed by human voice. Our transcripts are created using AI and human transcribers but may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting.

PAUL:

I don't know about you, but when I visit an art exhibition that makes me think, that really makes me think past the beautiful images and layers of paint, that's an art exhibition that can open doors for broader conversations.

Hey, it's Paul Wolf for the front-row seat to conversations on culture from Jackson, Mississippi. We call our podcast Soul Sessions. It's the people, places and events that make the City With Soul shine.

On today's show, artist Noah Saterstrom talks about his latest exhibition—‘What Became of Dr. Smith,’ on view at the Mississippi Museum of Art—and how his curiosity led to a reluctant revisiting of his own past and uncovered a new way to use his art to reach an even broader audience.

Just a quick note, there are mentions of mental illness in this episode.

This exhibition obviously had to be years in the making as in-depth and as detailed as it is. When did you start working on what became of Dr. Smith?

NOAH:

Oh, well, when I started working on it in earnest was the day that I came down in, I believe it was 2017, to be part of a panel discussion at the museum. And it was a very specific. We had a conversation about art and memory and family and difficult histories and how painting fits into those narratives. And after that conversation, I basically left and went to the Mississippi Department of Archives and History and said, I need to figure out what happened to my great grandfather. And they pulled out the big leather-bound ledger of the old asylum and I found his name in there. And then it began and I became preoccupied is a mild wave of describing the following years.

Later that day, I went to talk to Betsy Bradley at the Museum just to share that I was embarking on this quest. She thought that it tied in well with the museum's mission. And so in a way, the collaboration between me and the Mississippi Museum of Art started that day as well. They were very hands-off for many years while I was doing the work.

Also that same day, I met Stephen Parks, by chance—or by providence or whatever—the state librarian, and he took it upon himself to find the vast majority of the information that I now have in public record on the ground, going to libraries, going to courthouses, traveling out of state, following the thread of the story that he was you know, through newspaper clippings and our ongoing conversation.

PAUL:

To kind of set the stage for folks, this is a biographical—there are a lot of words, there's a lot of reading, but there's a lot of art, this big panoramic piece constructed of a multitude of canvases to help tell his life story. How long did it take you to actually do the paintings, to actually put the panorama together?

NOAH:

Well, it was a multi-stage process and each stage being essential to development of it. So from about 2017 until the pandemic started in 2020, I was only researching. I was collecting information. I was organizing it. I was developing a chronology that followed Dr. Smith's life from his birth as best as I could follow it until he effectively disappeared into state custody in 1925. And it was all words and images at that point. I hadn't started painting any of it.

And in March of 2020, I canceled every show and obligation and commission that I had and started working only on Dr. Smith-related works. And I started with the Artist Support Pledge. There's an artist right at the beginning of the pandemic in Britain called Matthew Burroughs, a printmaker. And he started this idea called the Artist Support Pledge. And it was very simple, like a stop-gap for artists who are struggling at the very beginning of the pandemic. And you'd post work for $200 and every time you sold $1 ,000 worth, you pledged to spend $200 on the work of another artist. I started doing those 12” by 12” oil paintings of Dr. Smith's life and that's all I did for the next few years and wound up making over 1,500 of these things that were then sold all over the world before I even started on the work that's at the museum.

And so after I had over a thousand, I felt like I had enough imagery to actually start. And so I basically made for myself a giant encyclopedia of imagery that I could then use to compose his life chronologically in larger form. And so basically, from 2017 to 2020, I was researching and then 2020 until 2022, I was only doing small studies. In about 2022, I guess, is when I started the big piece.

PAUL:

What did this teach you about yourself as you went through this seven-year-long process?

NOAH:

That's a big question. I did not anticipate learning about myself, particularly. That was not my motivation. I was genuinely just following a curiosity. It was only late in the process when the painting was almost finished, the big painting was almost finished. So at this point I had been working on it already for maybe six years.

And I was doing an interview with Ann Patchett for the catalog —the writer Ann Patchett. And she asked me how I identified with Dr. Smith. And it came out in that question that I guess I identified with him because I had a very significant and life-altering episode of mental disorder in my mid-20s, an episode of depersonalization, as I later came to find out. And then I stuffed that experience away and tried to forget that it ever happened. And I didn't start thinking about it and talking about it until that question emerged, you know, when the catalog was being written for this show. And then it started to dawn on me that the preoccupation that I had with Dr. Smith was intricately linked with my own experience of mental disorder. And I don't think I ever would have made the work if I had thought that it would be somehow therapeutic, you know?

Yet, somehow in the process of spending all these years painting about and thinking about and writing about Dr. Smith and uncovering his mental illness and taboos and silence around it, I wound up sort of unwrapping, you know, the gauze around my experience and found myself happily talking to rooms filled with people about something I had been terrified of in myself for decades.

PAUL:

This is as much an art exhibition as it is a look, an examination at, mental illness, mental disability, coping with those things as well, isn't it?

NOAH:

Yeah. I mean, I think that's fair to say. I never would have started out with that intention. I mean, that's so grand. But when I'm standing there and the conversations that I'm having with people in front of the painting are about, you know, people will come up to me and tell me about their father who committed suicide or their grandmother who disappeared or their son who has schizophrenia. And, you know, it's just every family. You know, it's a strange kind of effect that art can have to open people up because if I said, let's all gather together and tell each other stories about how their families were wrecked by mental illness, nobody would show up. But there's a museum exhibition, people show up to see the museum exhibition and it can have that effect of just drawing people out. And so I regularly get messages from people who I don't know from all over the world telling stories from their life. And I find it all very touching. I think it's a wonderful new stage in Dr. Smith's experience in the world to go from an erased figure in the family, damaged and unworthy of note to being a kind of conduit for healthy conversations around mental illness.

PAUL:

It's fascinating to see how an individual can take maybe personal tragedy and turn it into a triumph for not only yourself, but for other people.

NOAH:

I mean, I continue to be, it feels like a real gift to me. I mean, it is very much an ongoing story. You know, I've been a painter for a long time, my whole life. And I've made a lot of paintings and lots of bodies of work. And this one behaves in a very specific other kind of way. It resists being completed in a way.

All of what I learned about Dr. Smith basically ended when he entered state custody and entered the old asylum and then was moved to Whitfield. So 40 years, I knew absolutely nothing about, almost nothing at all. And he was in state custody from 1925 until his death in 1965, members of the Asylum Hill Project were helping me try to see if we could uncover his medical records.

And we were joking about how what if right before the show comes out, they discover his medical records and that is exactly what happened.

PAUL:

Oh my.

NOAH:

And so literally the week before the opening, Lyda Gibson, a wonderful colleague from the Asylum Hill Project, the archivists who are working with them, discovered Dr. Smith's medical records. 200, 300 pages worth of records that are incredibly detailed. Conversational language, interviews with him, letters he wrote, biography of himself. It's remarkable and it is—not to inject magical thinking into this—but it is as if, you know, he has been waiting for a willing host, for his story. And it's like, I make this painting and all of sudden, doors open up and he walks out. You know, a man who has been, no one has known a thing about is now by far the most documented person in the family and continues to be. There's a lot more that I don't know yet.

PAUL:

And paintings still to be created.

NOAH:

Long as I'm alive.

PAUL:

That's artist and historian Noah Satterstrom, whose exhibition, ‘What Became of Dr. Smith,’ is on view at the Mississippi Museum of Art through September 22. We've got tons of resources and info, including ways to help yourself or your loved ones struggling with mental disorders, in our show notes at visitjackson.com/soulsessions.

Our podcast is produced by Visit Jackson, the destination organization from Mississippi's capital city. Our executive producers are Jonathan Pettus and Dr. Ricky Thigpen, and I'm our managing editor. You want to know more about the great work we're doing to help Jackson Mississippi grow and shine? You can find that at visitjackson.com.

I'm Paul Wolf, and you've been listening to Soul Sessions.

Listen to previous episodes of Soul Sessions