George Ohr was born in Biloxi in 1857, trained in his father's blacksmith shop, and called himself the Mad Potter of Biloxi. He opened the Biloxi Art and Novelty Pottery in 1890. In October 1894 a fire burned much of the town, his studio and about a thousand pieces among it. What he made afterward is the work people drive here for: paper-thin vessels pinched, folded and twisted, with curling ribbon handles borrowed from his blacksmith days. By 1910 he had stopped potting and packed the work away. His children sold the whole collection in 1972 to a New Jersey antiques dealer.
Frank Gehry designed the campus for a beachfront site where a mansion called Lynoaks stood until Hurricane Camille in 1969, and the live oaks that survived inspired buildings that dance around the trees. Hurricane Katrina struck during construction in August 2005. A casino barge was jammed into a partly built gallery, but the Ohr pots and the museum's archives were saved. Work resumed in 2007, the first buildings opened in 2010, and the pavilions that hold the permanent Ohr display opened in 2014.
The campus also holds the Pleasant Reed Interpretive Center. Reed was born enslaved in 1854 and in 1887 built a house in Biloxi, one of the first documented houses there built and owned outright by a formerly enslaved man. Katrina destroyed the original, and this is a replica.
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