Walter Anderson was born in New Orleans in 1903, worked with his brother at Shearwater Pottery in Ocean Springs, and spent much of his last fifteen years on Horn Island, twelve rowing miles off the coast. He kept ninety journals and logs. He once tied himself to a tree to ride out a hurricane. The museum, which opened in 1991, is a cruciform redwood building joined to the Ocean Springs Community Center, and the connection is the point, because the center's walls are his.
In 1952 Anderson painted ninety-foot expanses there. One shows Iberville's 1699 landing, when the French built Fort Maurepas in what is now Ocean Springs. Most of the rest is the series he called the Seven Climates of Ocean Springs, a walk through light, weather and season. At the far end of the museum sits a room moved from his cottage at Shearwater, the Little Room, where he painted all four walls as one day on the coast, sunrise to night. The galleries also hold the Art Deco panels he painted for the Ocean Springs High School auditorium in 1934 under the WPA.
The permanent collection runs past eight hundred works. When Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005, the vault held, though 173 carved linoleum blocks kept in off-site storage were caught in a flood. Give the two mural rooms more time than the galleries.
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