Ohr-O'Keefe Museum of Art

George Ohr worked in Biloxi around the turn of the twentieth century, and he was like no other potter of his age. He threw his vessels extraordinarily thin, then reshaped them by hand into ruffled rims, pinched waists, folded and dented walls, and twisting forms that broke every rule of the neat, symmetrical pottery of his day. His glazes were just as bold, running to fiery reds, deep greens, metallic sheens, and mottled surfaces that still look modern more than a century later.

Ohr was flamboyant and proud, sporting an enormous mustache and calling himself the Mad Potter of Biloxi, and he insisted that no two of his pieces were ever alike. The public of his time largely dismissed him, and he eventually packed away thousands of his pots and gave up the wheel. Decades after his death, collectors and scholars rediscovered the hoard and recognized his genius, and today he is honored as one of the great original voices in American ceramics.

To house Ohr's collection, the museum commissioned Frank Gehry, one of the most famous architects in the world, whose sculptural, metal-clad buildings are landmarks from Los Angeles to Bilbao. For Biloxi he designed a campus of separate curving pods sheathed in stainless steel, their swooping forms echoing both the flowing shapes of Ohr's pottery and the live oaks that shade the site. The architecture is meant to be experienced as art in its own right.

The design deliberately weaves in the ancient live oaks on the grounds, some of them centuries old, so that the gleaming pods rise among and around the great trees rather than replacing them. The effect is a campus where architecture and landscape are bound together, and where the walk between the pods is as much a part of the visit as the galleries inside.

The museum's history is inseparable from Hurricane Katrina. In August 2005 the great storm slammed into the Mississippi coast with a devastating surge, and the museum campus, still under construction, was heavily damaged. The disaster forced a long and difficult rebuilding, and the museum that stands today emerged from that recovery, a symbol of the coast's resilience as much as a home for art.

The live oaks that survived the storm became part of the story too, standing as testaments to endurance on a coast that has weathered many hurricanes. When the museum finally opened its Gehry pods to the public, it did so as both a cultural landmark and a marker of how the community rebuilt itself after one of the worst storms in American history.

Biloxi and the Mississippi Sound lie in a region long inhabited by Indigenous peoples, among them the Biloxi, who gave the city its name, and the Choctaw of the wider region. The Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians remains a federally recognized tribe in the state today, centered to the north near Philadelphia. The coast's later history runs through French and Spanish colonial settlement, a great seafood industry built on shrimp and oysters, and its long life as a Gulf resort.

The museum sits within an easy circuit of the coast's other attractions. The beach and the Mississippi Sound are close by, the historic Biloxi Lighthouse stands along the shore, and the antebellum home of Beauvoir is nearby. Together they make Biloxi a rewarding stop, where art, architecture, history, and the Gulf all sit within a short drive of one another.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.