Images courtesy of the Ohr O'Keefe Museum.
The museum campus as pictured in 2019.
In early 2025, one of the Gulf Coast’s most anticipated architecture projects will finally be complete, after almost twenty years. The Ohr O’Keefe Museum of Art in Biloxi, Mississippi, designed by one of the country’s most preeminent architects Frank Gehry, has faced funding, zoning, and disaster-related delays that go all the way back to Hurricane Katrina, when the storm threw the Grand Casino Biloxi onto the museum’s African American Gallery. Progress has been ongoing ever since to realize Gehry’s hyper-modern, podlike design, which echoed the aesthetic of the “mad potter” George Ohr for whom the museum is named and envisioned the building “dancing” among the property’s massive live oaks. In the spring of 2023, the museum received a $1 million grant from the Mississippi Gulf Coast Restoration Fund to finally realize Gehry’s complete vision.
In anticipation of the museum campus’s completion, a recent exhibition at the museum celebrated Gehry’s immense body of work, with a focus on his longtime collaboration on the Gulf Coast with artist and urban planner Robert Tannen. It was Tannen, after all, who—while on the fundraising team for the new museum in the late 1990s—recommended Gehry for the job as architect. Called Art, Architecture, and Ideas: Frank Gehry and Robert Tannen, the exhibition chronicled the evolution of a friendship in creativity.
Robert Tannen
Tannen grew up in Seagate, America’s first planned community on the southernmost tip of Coney Island, New York. As a young man, he began carving and sculpting and on the beach near his family home often created stacked sculptures composed of found objects washed up on the shore. Found materials, conceptual exploration, and word-play have been hallmarks of his artwork throughout his career and stand in stark contrast to his work as an urban planner. After graduating in the 1950s from Pratt Institute with studies in art and urban planning, Tannen maintained a professional trajectory that includes, simultaneously, both disciplines. After a stint on the faculty of Franconia College, and employment with The Lazy Eight and Rand think tanks, in 1969 Tannen relocated to the Gulf Coast of Mississippi where, after the devastation of Hurricane Camille, he drew up transportation and neighborhood development plans for the city and created a master plan for the region.
Tannen’s interests are wide-ranging and include a large body of work in both the public and private spheres that touch on the economic and political consequences of our everyday choices in the present and for the future. From bridges to new towns in the desert of Iraq, his planning, like his artwork, is both playful and responsive to larger social concerns. Working in New Orleans and on the Gulf Coast, he has long been concerned with our changing environment and its implications for infrastructure and way of life. The Crescent City has benefitted from his innovation, which resulted in his master plan for the second span of the Mississippi River Bridge, his overseeing the creation of a citywide neighborhoods historic districts plan, and his selection of the site for the 1984 Louisiana World Expo that forever changed the riverfront. His multi-media art practice has been exhibited across the world and at all of Louisiana’s most esteemed institutions, including the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, the Hilliard Art Museum, the Contemporary Arts Center (of which he was a founder), and various galleries.
The exhibition at the Ohr O’Keefe Museum was neither an overview nor a retrospective, but it covered Tannen’s body of work, ranging from painting, drawing, sculpture, and ceramics produced over a period of half a century. For example, four boulders marked N, S, E, A and W–placed just outside the exhibition space—once resided in New Orleans, turning Lee Circle into a giant compass.
Courtesy of the Ohr O'Keefe Museum
A model of Frank Gehry's plans for the Ohr O'Keefe Museum in Biloxi—which will be completed after twenty years in 2025.
Frank Gehry
At ninety-five, Gehry is considered by many the greatest living global architect. From the early renovation of his family home in Santa Monica to the present, his work has redefined the expressive possibilities of architecture. Works such as Disney Hall and the Guggenheim Bilbao Museum serve as contemporary icons of what is possible in architecture.
Alongside his architectural work, Gehry has maintained a creative trajectory that includes ceramics, sculpture, furniture, product design, and drawing. Connecting him to the legacy of the museum’s namesake George Ohr, the recent exhibition included two early unseen narrative ceramic works he executed as a teenager, as well as a recent edition of sculptural ceramics for Tiffany. One of the goals of the exhibition was to showcase Gehry’s creative process across media, from the first simple massing of space to the final design concept. Seven different study models for a large fish sculpture clearly demonstrate Gehry’s enduring concern throughout his career with energy and movement. Included in the exhibition was a film by Sydney Pollock in which Gehry and his assistant Craig Webb finalized a design for the Ohr O'Keefe Museum’s African American Gallery, the very building that housed the exhibition.
The Friendship
Gehry first met Robert Tannen and his wife and partner Jeanne Nathan in New Orleans in the late 1970s. The friendship resulted in a long collaboration that includes an ecological museum in Panama, an amphitheater for the 1894 New Orleans World’s Fair, and the Ohr-O’Keefe Museum itself. Most recently, the two completed an oceanfront house in Pass Christian last year for New Orleans artist Tina Freeman. Called “The Gehry Gun,” the house is a modified shotgun featuring a central dog-trot inspired porch—originally designed as a functional prototype for affordable and environmentally sustainable housing that simultaneously meets the expectations of the region’s historic architecture.
With support from The Coastal Restoration Fund, the final phase of the Ohr O'Keefe Art Museum campus construction will be completed in early 2025. The exhibition Art, Architecture, and Ideas inaugurated a year of focus and celebration of this completion, which will culminate in a Gala party and reception at the Beau Rivage Casino in Biloxi in the last week of April, 2025.
David Houston is the Executive Director of the Ohr O'Keefe Museum. Learn more at georgeohr.org.
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