If museum exhibitions are meant to inspire and unsettle, the Mississippi Museum of Art has embraced its mission wholeheartedly, shining a light on a topic that is still largely taboo: mental illness and the state’s response to it.
Its exhibition “What Became of Dr. Smith” is thought-provoking, heart-wrenching and deeply personal, focusing on a contemporary, Nashville-based artist’s reckoning with a mental disorder; the struggles of his great-grandfather, who was institutionalized for the last 40 years of his life; and the history of the Mississippi State Insane Hospital, the state’s former public mental health hospital on whose grounds were recently found the remains of 7,000 unidentified people institutionalized there.
On display through Sept. 22, the exhibition at the Mississippi Museum of Art, in Jackson, will have three parts: a 122-foot-long painting comprising 183 canvases by Noah Saterstrom that depict episodes in the life of his great-grandfather, Dr. David Smith, a traveling optometrist, and his descendants, including Saterstrom; historical artifacts illustrating Dr. Smith’s life; and a third section on the Asylum Hill Project, exploring the history of the Mississippi State Insane Hospital.
In an essay for the exhibition’s catalog, Saterstrom said that in the mid-2010s he began working on a painting, “Road To Shubuta,” which he described as “the visual story of my ancestors’ Civil War-era flight from Natchez. Slave-owning members of the ruling class, they escaped to the east in an attempt to evade the Union occupation.” The painting was acquired by the Mississippi Museum of Art in 2018, which featured it in an exhibition from late 2017 until July 2018.
Saterstrom wrote that when he traveled to Jackson for the 2017 exhibition’s opening, he visited the Mississippi Department of Archives and History to explore his great-grandfather’s life, a mystery to him little discussed by his maternal grandmother, that traveling optometrist’s daughter.
With the help of the state’s librarian, Saterstrom wrote, he “pieced together a detailed picture of Dr. Smith’s life before his institutionalization. The story that unfolded was cinematic in scope. But while I’d gone into the task not expecting to like everything I learned (a speculation that’s proven true), what I did not anticipate was that Dr. Smith’s story would be as much a lens through which to see my own experience of mental illness as it is a generations-removed take of a man locked away for life.”
Saterstrom, 49, obtained his fine arts degree from the University of Mississippi in 1998 and, newly married, moved to Glasgow in the summer of 1999 to continue his art studies. “Within two years,” he wrote, “I was back in the U.S., divorced, and in the midst of an episode of depersonalization so intense I became convinced that not only did I not exist, but I had never existed.”
He continued: “I stopped painting, I went to therapy and I breathed rhythmically. I tried everything to feel anything but a ghost.”
What eventually pulled him back “from the existential abyss,” he said in the essay, was painting scenes from old family photograph albums. He said he painted as many of the photographs as he could, “not only because I thought they’d make good paintings, but because when I studied them, my memories became mine again.”
He added, “This was how my memories came back to me and how I came to love painting again.”
After years of research with the Mississippi state librarian and on his own, Saterstrom said he became obsessed with his great-grandfather’s life, noting that “the closer I came to piecing together the mystery of his life, the more I identified with him. It became impossible to work on anything else until I painted his life and did my best to capture as much of his story as I could. Painting everything I found about Dr. Smith became a way for me to try to understand why I made it through, but he remained lost.”
The canvases, created from early 2022 to early 2024, are displayed in one continuous work in the museum’s Barksdale Galleries.
Also on display in the galleries are photographs of Saterstrom’s great-grandfather and other members of his family; letters from Dr. Smith and his wife; newspaper clippings about episodes in Dr. Smith’s life; and even his great-grandfather’s traveling optometrist case, which Saterstrom’s family discovered in 2006 in a secret passageway in his grandmother’s house in Natchez.
The exhibition also provides information on the Asylum Hill Project, created in response to a discovery by a construction worker in 2012 of multiple burials in the last remaining undeveloped area of the campus of the University of Mississippi Medical Center, in Jackson. Archaeological exhumations began in late 2022 and are expected to continue until at least 2028.
The Center for Bioethics and Medical Humanities at U.M.M.C. is administering the Asylum Hill Project and is collaborating with the museum to use Saterstrom’s exhibition as a platform to discuss mental health issues and the history of the asylum. Jennifer E. Mack, lead bioarchaeologist of the Asylum Hill Project, will discuss its work at the museum on Tuesday. The museum will offer exhibition-related programming to U.M.M.C. medical, ophthalmology and psychiatry students in the fall.
Megan G. Hines, curator of the exhibition, said in a telephone interview that she hoped it would “bring about more open feelings about mental health issues and about treatment of mental health issues. These subjects have been taboo, difficult to talk about in the past.”
Dr. Ralph Didlake, a retired surgeon and director of the Center for Bioethics and Medical Humanities, said in a telephone interview that the unknown asylum patients whose remains were being studied “represent all of us, every demographic, all ages.”
Saterstrom’s exhibition, Dr. Didlake said, will provide “a great opportunity to talk about the stigma surrounding mental health challenges.”
“Art,” he added, “makes us think and reflect.”
The timing of the Mississippi exhibition is fortunate: The theme of the annual meeting of the American Alliance of Museums in Baltimore in May will be “thriving museums, healthy communities.” The association also said the meeting would “explore the nexus between culture and health.”
Among those speaking during the meeting’s keynote program will be Susan Magsamen, founder and director of the International Arts + Mind Lab at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and the opera singer and 2023 Kennedy Center honoree Renée Fleming, a longtime advocate for research exploring the intersection of the arts, health and neuroscience.
“What art can do,” Saterstrom wrote, “is remind us that every moment is valuable, even the unbearable ones, and every moment is worthy of note, even the mundane ones. It is the accumulation of these extraordinary instances and ordinary days that make us human and give contour to our lives.”
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