I’ve been waiting to visit the Ohr-O’Keefe Museum of Art in Biloxi for a long time — both because I’m a fan of George Ohr’s pottery, and Frank Gehry’s architecture. This is a pic I took of the damage done to Gehry’s work-in-progress in 2005, just after Katrina:
I finally got to see it all (much of it is still in construction):
A view from the top floor of the main building:
Beside the building in which visitors enter, there are a couple more buildings with their own theme:
I had a wonderful talk with a docent in the other space about Newcomb Pottery, then we talked about Gehry and his spaces. She’s also a fan, but the acoustics in that particular gallery were just awful. We had to stand close together in order to be able to hear one another — although we were the only two people in a gallery that wasn’t particularly large, we couldn’t carry on a conversation at what should have been a perfectly fine distance in most other spaces.
Among the Gehry quirks and preferences she told me about, she said that he didn’t like the walls to be littered with caption cards on the walls for each work of art, as it is in most every other museum.
The main building had these models of the architecture on display:
Some of Ohr’s ‘burned babies’ on exhibit:
I also toured the Pleasant Reed Interpretive Center, but thought it an odd addition to the campus. In 2013, the John S. and James L. Knight gallery (the ‘pods’) will open, dedicated to exhibit of Ohr’s pottery.
What else was really great was the gift shop, with fabulous pieces of Mississippi pottery in particular:
I got to bring home this (it was my Valentine’s Day present!), by Yvonne Brown of Gulfport:
