Dr. Megan Hines to speak at March 28 meeting of Natchez Historical Society

She will give preview of fall exhibit by Natchez native Noah Saterstrom at Mississippi Museum of Art
 

Dr. Megan Hines

NATCHEZ, Miss. – Dr. Megan Hines, a postdoctoral fellow of art history at the Mississippi Museum of Art and Millsaps College, will be the guest speaker at the March 28 meeting of the Natchez Historical Society. Her presentation is titled, “What Became of Dr. Smith: Painting A Hidden Mississippi History.”
 
The meeting will be held at the Historic Natchez Foundation, 108 S. Commerce St., with a social starting at 5:30 p.m. and the presentation at 6:00. It is free and open to the public.
 
Hines will provide a preview of the solo exhibition of the same name by Natchez native Noah Saterstrom in October 2023 at the Mississippi Museum of Art. Hines is the curator of the show. Dr. Smith is Saterstrom’s great-grandfather.

In her NHS lecture, Hines will speak about who Dr. Smith was and the mystery surrounding his disappearance from family history. Saterstrom’s painting, which is mural-sized, is 120 by 6 feet, and consists of 160 panels, some of which are set in Natchez, according to Alan Wolf, a director of NHS and its program chair.
 
“Having found Dr. Smith in the historical record, Noah in this work traces Dr. Smith through his life, times, and places in the State,” Wolf said. “This is a painting that, intriguingly and revealingly, depicts aspects of Mississippi history through a pictorial biography of a single and singular person.”
 
According to Hines, the painting “envisions the life of Saterstrom’s great-grandfather, an itinerant optometrist whose mental illness and subsequent disappearance resulted in his erasure from the family history.”
 
During several years of research, Saterstrom found that Dr. Smith was institutionalized for the final 40 years of his life in the Mississippi State Insane Hospital (the Old Asylum) in Jackson, Miss., and later at nearby Whitfield, from 1925-65.
 
Hines said that Saterstrom work on Dr. Smith has grown in popularity. In fact, over the past three years, Saterstrom sold more than 1,300 paintings related to his history and family. This has resulted in a large following on social media, including an international audience.
 
Hines holds a doctorate in art history, which she earned at Stony Brook University. According to her biography, her dissertation, “Art and Biotech: Bay Area Networks, 1965-85,” focused on changing visualizations of life and identity in the age of biotechnology.
 
Hines’ work as a curatorial assistant has included such exhibitions as “Mark Bradford: Tomorrow Is Another Day” at the American Pavilion at the 2017 Venice Biennale, and “Postwar—Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945-65,” shown at the Haus der Kunst in Munich in 2016.
 
Hines is published in Media-N: Journal of the New Media Caucus. She has another article that is forthcoming in American Art.
 
According to Wolf, Hine’s visit to Natchez will be her second. “She is enthused to come here and offer us an advance look at the show,” he said. “How fitting for Natchez that it should be so!”
 
For more information, visit natchezhistoricalsociety.org or send email to info@natchezhistoricalsociety.org