George E Ohr

In the late 1800s, self-taught potter George E. Ohr revolutionised pottery. From his home in coastal Mississippi, the eldest son of Alsatian immigrants developed an all-consuming practice and persona.

Ohr’s clay pots were precise and prolific. Their radical shapes and modern glazes marked a shift in vessel making, challenging both the art establishment and cultural conventions. Yet Ohr’s proto-abstract experiments proved too unpalatable for local taste. Throughout his lifetime, the "Mad Potter of Biloxi" was ignored, and his legacy went unrecorded in the history of American art.

That changed seventy years later when his work was rediscovered by his descendants. Heralded as a pioneer of modernist making, Ohr was soon collected and championed by David Whitney, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns. Johns repeatedly depicted Ohr’s work in his paintings.

Posthumously embraced by his peers, Ohr’s pots found a place in the Western canon. They are now in collections at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Smithsonian. Frank Gehry designed a museum in Ohr’s hometown of Biloxi, and over thirty works were exhibited at the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh in 2013.