Along the Coast...

A trip to the Coast for a day ( or a week-end) should include a visit at the Ohr-O'Keefe Museum of Art in Biloxi and at the Walter Anderson Museum of Art across the bridge in Ocean Springs.

The Ohr Museum presently features a selection of portraits from the Mott-Warsh Collection at the Gallery of African American Art. Twenty artists are represented by thirty works, including paintings, drawings, lithographs, watercolors and one sculpture. Some artists are well-known like Romare Bearden, Elizabeth Catlett, Robert Mapplethorpe, Richard Wyatt. The common subject of the exhibition is to show black portraiture to "examine the social, political, and cultural nuances of the Black face and head in fine art and popular visual culture" according to the catalogue of the exhibition. The quality of the catalogue published for the occasion needs to be emphasized. It becomes also a great reference later.

A similar very informative catalogue comes with the other exhibition in the next gallery Earth.Sea.Sky, Southern Ceramics from the Dod Stewart Collection. A detailed history and description of features related to the Newcomb, Singing River and Shearwater potteries invite the visitor to take a closer look at the precious works.

A very interesting visit which of course includes a viewing of Ohr's potteries described in a previous blog.

The next visit is fifteen minutes away, at the WAMA. Recently the museum displayed  Walter Anderson's and John Alexander's works, One World, Two Artists, John Alexander and Walter Anderson  first held at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art. The future is looking good with another interesting exhibition coming up in June with works from the abstract artist Eugene Martin.

Stretching the trip, one can drive to Mobile to see
Today's Visual Language Southern Abstraction, A Fresh Look at the museum of art. This is my next visit, stay tuned...

photographs by the author:

"Running Wild", Allie McGhee, 1941

"Mother and Child", Romare Barden, 1969