Mississippi’s pottery tradition is older and stranger than most people expect. It runs from the work of Native potters long before statehood, through farm stoneware made for everyday use, to George Ohr’s wildly inventive art pottery in Biloxi, the Anderson family’s Shearwater Pottery in Ocean Springs, and the working studios across the state today.
For designers and collectors, that history is more than background. It gives handmade ceramics from Mississippi a story you can tell a client, and it explains why carved and decorated stoneware fits so naturally into Southern interiors. It’s also part of what draws designers to sgraffito ceramics for interior designers made here.
What follows is a short history, kept to what is well documented.
Before the art potters
People were making pottery in what is now Mississippi for thousands of years before European settlement. Native communities in the region, including the mound-building societies of the Mississippian period, shaped and fired vessels for cooking, storage and ceremony.
In the nineteenth century, potters across the South made utilitarian stoneware: churns, jugs, crocks and storage jars for farm households. This was working pottery, made from local clay and fired hard enough to hold food and drink. It was rarely signed and almost never thought of as art at the time, though collectors value it now.
That practical foundation matters. Southern ceramics grew out of pots people used every day, and the best contemporary work in the region still holds on to that.
George Ohr, the Mad Potter of Biloxi
George E. Ohr was born in Biloxi in 1857 and became one of the most original potters America has produced. He learned the craft in New Orleans, traveled to see potteries in other states, and came home to open his own shop on the Mississippi Gulf Coast.
Ohr threw vessels with walls so thin they seemed impossible, then pinched, folded, twisted and crumpled them while the clay was still soft. His glazes were just as experimental. He called himself the Mad Potter of Biloxi and promoted his work with a showman’s flair, but the pots themselves were serious. They broke nearly every rule of the polite art pottery of his day.
A fire swept through Biloxi in 1894 and destroyed his shop. He rebuilt and kept working, though his work found few buyers in his lifetime. He stopped potting in the early 1900s and died in 1918. His family kept thousands of his pieces in storage for decades. When that collection finally came to market in the second half of the twentieth century, collectors, artists and museums recognized how far ahead of his time he had been.
Today the Ohr-O’Keefe Museum of Art in Biloxi, with buildings designed by architect Frank Gehry, keeps his work in the city where he made it.
Shearwater Pottery and the Andersons
A few miles east, in Ocean Springs, Peter Anderson founded Shearwater Pottery in 1928 with the support of his family. His brothers, Walter Inglis Anderson and James McConnell Anderson, decorated pieces there, and Walter went on to become one of the best-known artists of the Gulf Coast.
Shearwater’s decorated wares drew on the coast itself: birds, fish, plants and the life of the marsh and barrier islands. That habit of looking closely at the local landscape and putting it on a pot is one of the clearest threads in Mississippi ceramics. The pottery has remained in the Anderson family, and the Walter Anderson Museum of Art in Ocean Springs is devoted to Walter’s work.
The Delta and the decades after
In the Mississippi Delta, Lee and Pup McCarty founded McCarty’s Pottery in Merigold in the 1950s. Their simple, earthy forms, many marked with a dark line often described as the river, became a familiar sight in Mississippi homes and remain a well-loved regional name.
Since then, craft guilds, university art programs and independent studios have kept the tradition active across the state. Mississippi pottery today is not one style. It ranges from functional dinnerware to sculpture, and many working potters still draw on the land around them for their imagery.
Where carved Southern stoneware fits
April Dupuis is one of those working potters. She trained in Indiana, where she learned sgraffito as studio assistant to potter John Peterson from 2005 to 2007, and earned a Master of Ceramics and Visual Arts from Ball State University. Today she works from her studio in Oxford, Mississippi, and has exhibited with the Memphis Potters Guild for 15 years.
At The Potter’s Hands Studio, she throws stoneware, coats it in white porcelain slip and carves through it by hand. Her imagery comes from Southern gardens: magnolia, dogwood, cotton blossom, camellia, lilies and Delta botanicals. Like Shearwater’s coastal birds, those motifs tie the work to a specific place. You can read more about the technique in what sgraffito is, or see how designers use that sense of place in Southern ceramic art for hospitality projects.
No one working today is George Ohr, and it would be a stretch to claim his mantle. But the instinct he and the Andersons shared, that a pot made here should look like it came from here, is very much alive.
Questions people ask
Who was George Ohr?
George E. Ohr was a potter from Biloxi, Mississippi, who lived from 1857 to 1918. Known as the Mad Potter of Biloxi, he made thin-walled, folded and twisted vessels with experimental glazes that are now considered landmarks of American art pottery.
What is Shearwater Pottery?
Shearwater Pottery is a family pottery in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, founded by Peter Anderson in 1928. His brothers Walter Inglis Anderson and James McConnell Anderson decorated pieces there with imagery from the Gulf Coast.
Where can I see historic Mississippi pottery?
The Ohr-O’Keefe Museum of Art in Biloxi holds George Ohr’s work, the Walter Anderson Museum of Art in Ocean Springs is devoted to Walter Anderson, and Shearwater Pottery still operates in Ocean Springs.
If you are sourcing work with Mississippi roots for a client, the Designer Trade Program is the place to start a conversation about a commission.