ABOUT GEORGE E. OHR
Southern artist whose experimental approach to manipulating clay earned him the nickname, the "Mad Potter of Biloxi." Considered by some to be the father of the American Abstract-Expressionism movement.
He was a ceramics apprentice to Joseph Fortune Meyer in 1879. He was a featured vendor at the World's Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition in New Orleans in 1884.
He was hated by the Arts and Crafts Movement of the early 1900s; he was primarily reviled for a lack of perfection in his art and minimal self-discipline in his persona. His work later became revered for pioneering the abstract sculpture and pottery movement of the mid-20th century.
His parents were German immigrants who settled in Biloxi. He married Josephine Gehring in 1886 with whom he fathered 10 children; only five managed to reach adulthood.
He incorporated many of the showman techniques of P.T. Barnum into his self-promotion; "unequaled, undisputed, unrivaled" were three ways in which he described himself.
