![]() The Ohr-O’Keefe Museum of Art, a Smithsonian Affiliate, is named in honor of former Biloxi mayor Jeremiah O’Keefe and his late wife, Annette. Gehry, whose swirling silver Guggenheim Museum put Bilbao, Spain, on the cultural map. ![]() Two years from now, Ohr’s startling ceramics will be showcased in a new $25 million Biloxi arts center designed by architect Frank O. Some 85 years after his death, the self-styled “Mad Potter of Biloxi” will be praised and honored as he predicted. Yet he predicted, “When I am gone, my work will be praised, honored, and cherished. that I am a mistake,” he said in an interview in 1901. No wonder that as the new century began, thousands of the colorful, misshapen works collected dust on Ohr’s shelves, leaving the potter mad, indeed, at a world that failed to appreciate him. “No two alike,” he boasted, but to most customers each looked as weird as the next. He wanted $25-the equivalent of about $500 today-for a crumpled pot with wacky handles. If the pots and the man’s appearance did not prove lunacy, his prices did. And there was something in Ohr’s eyes-dark, piercing and wild-that suggested, at the very least, advanced eccentricity. But as they got a bit closer, customers could glimpse the 18-inch mustache he had wrapped around his cheeks and tied behind his head. With his huge arms folded across his dirty apron, he looked more blacksmith than potter. Viewed from a distance across his cluttered shop, George Ohr didn’t look mad. ![]() The entire studio seemed like some mad potter’s hallucination, and standing in the middle of it all was the mad potter himself. And colors! In contrast to the boring beiges of Victorian ceramics, these works exploded with color-vivid reds juxtaposed with gunmetal grays olive greens splattered across bright oranges royal blues mottled on mustard yellows. Alongside them were pitchers that seemed deliberately twisted and vases warped as if melted in the kiln. These pots featured rims that had been crumpled like the edges of a burlap bag. One read: “Get a Biloxi Souvenir, Before the Potter Dies, or Gets a Reputation.” Another proclaimed: “Unequaled unrivaled-undisputed- GREATEST ARTPOTTERON THE EARTH.” Stepping inside, a curious tourist found a studio overflowing with pots. Approaching it, a visitor saw hand-lettered signs. Just a few blocks from shore, a five-story wooden “pagoda” labeled “BILOXI ARTPOTTERY” towered above the train tracks that ran across Delauney Street. Then, in the 1890s, the town boasted a new tourist attraction, one based on genius or madness, depending on one’s point of view. Yet back in those years, there were no casinos as there are now, and not a lot to do besides swim, stroll and eat shrimp. Along with its beaches, the little town had its own opera house, white streets paved with crushed oyster shells, and fine seafood. Riding the train south through the deep pine woods of Mississippi in the early 1880s, tourists to the Gulf Coast came to Biloxi for sunshine and surf.
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