Artistic Giants of Mississippi

Walter Anderson Museum of Art

Ocean Springs, MS

Walter Anderson’s namesake museum, which celebrated its 30th anniversary in 2022, pays homage to the artist-naturalist’s pioneering work. With a stated mission of empowering connections between people and the natural world, the museum showcases works by Anderson and the many artists he influenced. Born at the turn of the 20th century, Anderson’s artistic training spanned an impressive geographic range: from New Orleans—the city of his birth—to New York, Philadelphia, and France, where he was deeply influenced by prehistoric cave paintings he saw there. But after settling on the Mississippi Gulf Coast on family land, Anderson focused his attention on the coastal landscapes, flora, and fauna that surrounded him, capturing the coast’s natural rhythms in distinctive geometric patterns and color palettes, creating works of arresting beauty.

True art consists of spreading wide the intervals so that imagination may fill the space between the trees.

Walter Inglis Anderson, artist-philosopher

Anderson was a multi-faceted artist who worked in watercolor, wood carvings, block prints (which were widely shared by Anderson to make his art more accessible), ceramics, and sketches. His work extended to large-scale murals, furniture, and textiles, too. As Mississippi historian Patti Black Carr wrote, “[Anderson’s] significance in the history of art may lie in his perception of fundamental reality: the interconnectedness of the world, the dynamism of matter, the knowledge that man is a participant in nature rather than an observer.” When the Walter Anderson Museum of Art opened in 1991, Anderson was widely recognized, and celebrated, as a cultural "patron saint" of Mississippi and the Gulf South. https://visitmississippi.org/things-to-do/art-museums/walter-anderson-museum-of-art/

Shearwater Pottery

Ocean Springs, MS

Almost a century ago, Peter Anderson founded Shearwater Pottery, on acreage originally purchased by his parents in Ocean Springs. His mother Annette, who studied art at Tulane University, had a deep appreciation for the arts and encouraged her three sons’ creative instincts. All became artists (Walter and Mac, Peter’s younger brothers, both joined the pottery studio as well). The style of pottery that Peter produced was intentionally created with a dual purpose: to be aesthetically pleasing in color and form, as well as functional (in today’s parlance, that translates to being dishwasher, microwave, and oven-safe), while his brothers focused on more romantic figurines influenced by fairytales. In addition to developing a range of unique glazes and color combinations, Shearwater Pottery is known for incorporating two specific clay bodies, using a combination of white-bodied clay sourced from Tennessee, and buff-bodied clay dug from Mississippi and Alabama.

Today, Shearwater Pottery is run by a younger generation of Andersons who oversee its pottery production and preserve the family legacy and name, one beautiful piece at a time. http://shearwaterpottery.com/

Ohr-O’Keefe Museum of Art

Biloxi, MS

When I found the potter’s wheel, I felt it all over like a wild duck in water.

George Ohr, the “Mad Potter of Biloxi”

Amidst a landscape of live oaks rises a cluster of four extraordinary buildings designed by the legendary architect Frank Gehry. Together, the buildings comprise the core of the Ohr-O’Keefe Museum of Art—a contemporary art museum dedicated to the ceramic art of George Ohr. Although Ohr was active during the period known as the American Renaissance (approximately the 1870s to the 1910s), Ohr was an artist ahead of his time who did not receive the recognition he felt he deserved during his lifetime. Deeply attached to his work, Ohr dug his own clay from the banks of the Tchoutacabouffa River, and toiled endlessly to refine structure and form, turning out newspaper-thin pieces that “twisted, ruffled, and folded.” Later he experimented with bisque pots, turning out works that became more abstract and sculptural in style. Embittered by the lack of recognition he received, Ohr instructed his heirs to hide his pottery after his death, and it was only during the 1960s, when a large body of work was rediscovered, that Ohr’s achievements began to be more widely appreciated. 

In addition to Ohr’s work, the Ohr-O’Keefe Museum of Art also holds collections of Asian ceramics and presents exhibitions of work by modern-day ceramicists, sculptors, and painters. https://visitmississippi.org/things-to-do/art-museums/ohr-okeefe-museum-of-art/

Wolfe Studio

Jackson, MS

Karl and Mildred Nungester Wolfe launched Wolfe Studio in Jackson in 1946; currently, it is run by their daughter and artist Elizabeth (Bebe) Wolfe. Their talents spanned artistic media and forms that included painting, mosaic, stained glass, ceramics, and printmaking. Karl was a popular portraitist and Mildred focused on daily life scenes and landscapes. Through the years, the couple contributed multiple pieces both for use in public spaces and collections around the country.

Today, the studio remains best-known for its signature Wolfe Birds, well over a dozen varieties of glazed ceramic representations, from cardinals to wrens, set in endearing poses as if about to take flight. To carry on the legacy of the founders, the studio has expanded, and now features work by more than a dozen Jackson-based artists who continue to create the beloved Wolfe birds. https://thewolfestudio.com/

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Your inner wanderer awaits: for information on these and dozens of other arts destinations in Mississippi, see visitmississippi.org/things-to-do/arts-culture/