Ohr, Gehry, Tretheway

I am the apostle of individuality, the brother of the human race, but I must be myself and I want every vase of mine to be itself. --George Ohr, potter.

It’s going to be hard to photograph this group of structures. Unless people come here and walk around in it, they’re not going to get it. --Frank Gehry, speaking of the museum he designed to house the work of George Ohr, in a documentary called Dancing With the Trees. 

I write this from home, in Portland, where I am still collecting my rattled molecules at the end of a trip that was an adventure, a reminiscence of times past, a meeting with beloved friends, and a shock. The photo, taken on the morning of the day we flew back, is of one small part of the museum in Biloxi, Mississippi designed by Frank Gehry to honor the ceramic art of George Ohr. Gehry created the museum, he said, as a dance with the live oak trees that are integral to the design. It is also an homage to architectural styles of the southern USA (the red brick, the columns, the white porch railings and curving staircases). 

Ohr had a terrific ego. He believed in himself and the value of his work. Sadly for him, he had no success in his lifetime. He died in 1918, and it was only in the 1970s and 80s, when cultural icons like Andy Warhol began to celebrate Ohr’s strange ceramics, that his work became popular. 

Part of the museum is the small white house of a freed slave named Pleasant Reed. Presently that part of the museum has an exhibit of photographs of the Native Guard, former slaves who joined the Union Army to fight the Confederacy during the US Civil War. The historical photographs are presented with the very powerful, elegant, spare writing of Natasha Tretheway, currently Poet Laureate of the USA. Here is an excerpt of her Pulitzer Prize winning book called Native Guard, in which she speaks in the name of a man in the Native Guard: 

“Truth be told, I do not want to forget anything of my former life: the landscape’s song of bondage--dirge in the river’s throat where it churns into the gulf, wind in trees choked with vines. I thought to carry with me want of freedom, though I had been freed, remembrance not constant recollection.” I have added her book to my wish list. Maybe for Christmas....