Noah Saterstrom
b. 1974
Brattleboro, Vermont
Raised in Natchez, Mississippi and educated at Scotland’s Glasgow School of Art, Noah Saterstrom’s paintings, drawings, and animations have been shown most recently in New Orleans, LA; Jackson, MS; Kingston, NY, Nashville, TN; Asheville, NC; New York, NY; Seattle, WA; Brooklyn, NY; Tucson, AZ and Glasgow, Scotland. He has collaborated with writers including Laynie Browne, Anne Waldman, Julia R. Gordon, Joan Fiset, and Kate Bernheimer. He has published art-related essays and articles and was a regular contributor to Nashville Arts Magazine. His painting “Road to Shubuta” was acquired by the Mississippi Museum of Art in 2018. His painting “Maeve” is the cover of Ann Patchett’s newest book, The Dutch House (Harper Collins, 2019).
Currently Saterstrom is working on a deeply personal series titled, “What Became of Dr. Smith”, “…an ongoing series of paintings about my great grandfather, an itinerant optometrist in Mississippi, whose mental illness and subsequent disappearance caused him to be erased from the family story.”
Saterstrom’s work resides in private and public collections throughout the United States as well as Canada, Scotland, England, South Africa, Australia, Singapore, Japan, and Panama. He has been Artist-in-Residence for HRH Prince Charles at Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh, Morris and Spottiswood in Glasgow, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and Exploded View Microcinema in Tucson. His paintings are widely collected by the Ritz-Carlton New Orleans and the Westin Jackson. He lives in Nashville with his wife and three kids.
"‘What Became of Dr. Smith’, is an ongoing series of paintings about my great grandfather, an itinerant optometrist in Mississippi, whose mental illness, criminal transgressions and subsequent disappearance resulted in his near full erasure from the family history. I, armed with a sheaf of ancestral photographs and first-person written accounts, and in conjunction with the help of Mississippi’s State Librarian, have been searching state, local and private archives for evidence of Dr. Smith’s life.
I may well be on a quest to answer the unanswerable: who was my great grandfather before the psychotic episode that arguably ruined his life? Was he a madman, a criminal, or both? Was my forefather shaped in evil or molded from confusion and shame? What did his days look like before the institutionalization? After? Does his story dovetail with the horror tales that have emerged from the old asylum in Jackson and the Mississippi State Hospital in Whitfield, or did he receive modern (for the time) psychiatric care? What has and continues to emerge is a complex, shifting, multi-generational story of how mental illness is handled in a culture unequipped to tolerate difference, much less that which it deems defective.
Painting is a slippery and non-linear medium, which makes it uniquely suited to this inherently fractured and disjointed story. Dr. Smith’s tale is rendered in a series of narrative paintings that are united in their disordered reflection of a dual splintering of mind and history. Much of the imagery is derived directly from my family photograph albums from the years before Dr. Smith’s disappearance. The series so far has produced hundreds of small “study” paintings as well as the collection of larger works that I’m delighted to show here with Conde Contemporary. The culmination of this body of work will be shown at the Mississippi Museum of Art in 2023.”