[CPProt.net] Sun Herald Biloxi: Some museum pieces rescued in time

[MSN CPPnet (Ton Cremers)]

Posted on Sun, Sep. 11, 2005 

Some museum pieces rescued in time

BY PAM FIRMIN

Sun Herald


(KRT) - Whoever coined the concept that creativity is heightened by troubled
times probably wasn't thinking about the near cultural and artistic collapse
that has befallen South Mississippi and New Orleans due to Hurricane
Katrina.

While much is gone, the structure of coastal art communities remains in its
artists, the appetites of the people and the art institutions that intend to
return, rebuild and reopen.

Hats off to the individual artists who are cleaning mud out of their studios
and going forward. Hats off even if you haven't gotten around to it yet, but
you intend to.

It's hard to find out how art businesses fared, much less individual people.
We want to know about everybody, and it seems like we can't find out about
anybody. People are scattered, and you don't know where to look for them.
It's hard to get a phone call through. Most folks don't have e-mail and
traffic makes any unnecessary trip prohibitive - plus many of the places we
want to go are inaccessible.

As it becomes possible, please let us know what you have learned and seen
about the art communities in your own areas, and the people in them.

Following is a brief look at what's happening in the places that we have
been able to either contact or look at.

George Ohr pots that were secured on the second floor of the Ohr-O'Keefe
Museum in downtown Biloxi when 3 feet of water washed through the first
floor on Aug. 29 were undamaged and were moved Thursday to the Mobile (Ala.)
Museum of Art.

Most pieces had been packed up for the storm, said Anna Stanfield, director
of exhibitions and education, and the rest, including a nearly six-foot urn,
were secured Thursday in a joint effort by folks from both museums and
placed in Mobile's on-site storage, which is equivalent to a vault.

The pieces are a mix of museum-owned art and loaners from private
collections. Ohr officials are trying to contact owners of the loaned art as
quickly as possibly.

Executive director Marjie Gowdy, who spent the storm in her attic and later
evacuated, said in a telephone message that "I ... we will rebuild, and we
want very much to be a part of the rebuilding of the Coast."

The same sentiment was expressed immediately after the storm by
internationally acclaimed architect Frank Gehry, designer of the new
five-structure Ohr museum complex under construction on Biloxi's east beach.
Scheduled to open in July 2006, it would have replaced the old museum
downtown. Some of the new structures appear to have been unharmed by the
storm, but at least one was damaged by the Grand Casino barge that washed
into it.

The same barge obliterated an adjacent historical home, the Biloxi-owned
Tullis-Toledano Manor built in 1856. Also gone, almost as if it were never
there, is the Pleasant Reed House, which was built about 1887 by a freed
slave and moved to the Ohr site in 2003 as a cornerstone of its African
American cultural exhibit.

OCEAN SPRINGS

Walter Anderson Museum of Art on Washington Avenue in Ocean Springs, which
collects, exhibits and conserves the diverse works of naturalist artist
Walter Anderson (1903-1965) escaped damage, but its executive director,
Marilyn Lyons, evacuated to Washington, D.C., after her home in Pascagoula
was destroyed.

Myriad murals painted by Walter Anderson on the walls of the Ocean Springs
Community Center adjacent to the museum miraculously escaped damage despite
the room's ongoing moisture problems, which exist even without a storm. Only
last month, the city secured a $100,000 federal grant to protect the murals
by better securing the room.

The legendary Shearwater Pottery in Ocean Springs that was started in 1928
by Walter's younger brother, Peter Anderson, is gone - its showroom, at
least three of the houses where family members lived and the pottery,
itself. The family vault there suffered water damage and artist volunteers
are conducting initial first aid for Walter Anderson's paintings that were
rescued and will require professional restoration.

Those are being worked on currently at the community center and at WAMA,
which are still closed to the public.

Also gone with Katrina are the Seafood Museum on Biloxi's devastated Point
Cadet, the Dantzler House just north of the Lighthouse at Porter Avenue and
U.S. 90, along with Moran's Art Studio and Gallery on Porter Avenue, where
visitors could view skeletons of early settlers who were found buried
beneath the house.

J. L. Scott Marine Education Center on the south side of Point Cadet has
significant damage and everything inside washed out.

GULFPORT

The structure of Sarah Gillespie Gallery at William Carey on the Coast on
the beach remains, but its insides have been blown out, along with the new
exhibit of Bill Nelson art that was about to open.

Beauvoir Library and museum, the home of the Confederacy's one and only
president, Jefferson Davis, lost the porches on the main house, which
survived and is still on its piers. The cistern has disappeared, the
memorial gateway is shattered and the small cottages are gone, all according
to historian and Civil War expert Charles Sullivan, who spent a recent day
there. The hospital is a pile of bricks and the cannon inside is belly up,
he reports. The library's first floor was gutted and just the iron beams
still stand. Upstairs is safe.

Standing underneath the library is the life-size statue of Jefferson Davis.

Grass Lawn on the Gulfport beach front is gone.

Lynn Meadows Discovery Center in Gulfport stands strong amid a virtual sea
of debris that was once homes and businesses to the south. From a distance,
which is as close as one can get, the front of the children's museum looks
undamaged and has no obviously broken windows. A porch that was probably in
the back is disconnected and sitting on the south side of the building.

BILOXI

The Dusti Bonge Foundation's collection of photographs, paintings and
drawings by Dusti, Archie and Lyle Bonge is unscathed, according to
foundation director Julian Brunt in Biloxi.

Because the foundation partners closely with the Ogden Museum of Southern
Art in New Orleans, Brunt has been in touch with its curator, David Houston,
who told Brunt the Ogden and its art are safe, located at 925 Camp St. The
Warehouse District of New Orleans where the Ogden is, remains relatively
dry, according to a later press release.

The Ogden maintains a permanent collection of Bonge art, which includes
Dusti Bonge's classical paintings from the `20s and `30s, her later work as
an abstract expressionist and Lyle Bonge's collection of black and white
abstract photographs.

Houston told Brunt that the art was secured during the storm in the upstairs
vault and guards placed at the door until the National Guard arrived after
the storm. He said there was no water in the building.

Across the street is the D-Day Museum, but Brunt had no information on its
condition.

The first floor washed out in the Mardi Gras Museum in the Magnolia Hotel
near the Vieux Marche. Many exhibits and artifacts had already been moved to
the new museum, which was to be in the historic Dantzler House - and that is
gone. Structurally, the Magnolia Hotel is fine, said

Bill Raymond, the city's historical administrator, it will just have to be
redone.

The Saenger Theater had some water damage, but overall is in good shape,
Raymond said.

After the storm, we peeked through the windows of the Ocean Springs Art
House, which was standing and had been emptied of exhibits, and drove by the
Mary C. O'Keefe Cultural Center in Ocean Springs. Both looked fine.

There's no info available here on the condition of the Jolly McCarty Old
Train Depot Art Center and Gallery in Pascagoula, or galleries in Bay St.
Louis.

Any information is welcome.

---

The Sun Herald (Biloxi, Miss.).

Visit The Sun Herald Online at http://www.sunherald.com