George Ohr: The Mad Potter of Biloxi

"I am making pots for art's sake, God's sake, the future generations, and for my own satisfaction...but when I am gone my work will be prized, honored, and cherished. It will come. -- George Edgar Ohr, 1899

George E. Ohr was the most influential and controversial individuals in American art pottery history. His work anticipated many of the developments that we take for granted in contemporary ceramics. He took the wheel drove ceramic arts right past the functional to the very point of abstraction. He was born in Biloxi, Mississippi on July 12, 1857 at 10 am "sharp" as he liked to say and died in 1918. Ohr began producing art pottery in the early 1880s. It is estimated that he created in the area of approximately 10,000 pieces during his lifetime.

George Ohr was a wild showman and show off. Calling himself the "Mad Potter of Biloxi," he was a wild showman in the style of P.T. Barnum who experimented with early photography, had a risque sense of humor and an outsized ego (which turns out to be deserved).

George Ohr pottery is typically characterized by the twisted, manipulated, and violently tortured nature of his forms. No two of his pots were alike and his glazes were shockingly unique.

In 1894 two events occurred which altered the direction of Ohr's life and work -- The World's Columbian Exposition which exposed the artist to modernism and the promise of a new century, and a major fire which destroyed downtown Biloxi including the artist's studio and all his prior work, some 10,000 pieces of pottery. The work he created after the fire shows a distinctive change in his style. He began working in a more expressionistic style, heavily manipulating the clay to evoke the free form of nature. Both his glazes and his bisque work are highly prized.