Ohr-O'Keefe Museum of Art

Look at almost any American art pottery from the 1890s and you get a symmetrical vessel with a controlled glaze, made to sit on a mantelpiece. Then look at an Ohr pot. The wall is as thin as a teacup. The neck has been squeezed shut. The side has been pushed in with a thumb and left, and the whole form looks as if it is in the middle of collapsing and has decided not to. The glazes are gunmetal, raspberry, mottled green, sometimes several at once.

He was doing this in Biloxi, a seafood town of a few thousand people, and selling almost nothing. He wrote that no two of his pieces were alike and claimed to have made more than twenty thousand of them. He called his workshop the Pot-Ohr-E, worked it as a tourist attraction, and let people come and watch. By around 1909 he had stopped potting altogether.

A fire in the 1890s is widely reported to have taken his workshop, and accounts differ on how much of the stock went with it. What is not in doubt is that at the end of his working life he crated up what he had left and refused to break it up, insisting it was a single body of work for the nation to buy.

Nobody bought it. He died in New Orleans in 1918, and the crates went into storage.

The pots sat in a building behind the motor business Ohr's sons ran in Biloxi. Not a vault, not a museum store: a garage, on the Gulf coast, through five decades of heat, damp and hurricanes.

In 1970 a New Jersey antiques dealer called Jim Carpenter found them and bought most of the collection from the family. That single transaction is the reason the man has a museum. Ohr's work entered the New York market in the 1970s, at precisely the moment when abstract expressionism had taught American critics to look at gesture and accident as intention, and a body of work that had read as incompetent in 1900 read as fifty years ahead of itself in 1975.

Prices followed. Pieces that had been unsellable for a dollar became six-figure objects, and museums that had ignored him started competing.

The lesson attached to this story is the one the museum actually teaches, and it is worth having in your head before you walk into the galleries. Nothing about the pots changed between 1918 and 1975. What changed was what people had learned to see. Standing in front of them now, with the benefit of a century of modern art, the difficulty is understanding how anybody ever thought they were bad.

The brief was unusual: build a museum on a small coastal site occupied by mature live oaks, and do not remove the oaks. Live oaks on this coast are enormous, low and wide-limbed, often older than the city, and they are treated locally as something close to civic property.

Gehry's answer was to break the museum into separate buildings and thread them between the trees — curved forms in stainless steel and glass, each one small, the whole arrangement described at the time as pods dancing among the oaks. The metalwork was fabricated by Zahner of Kansas City. The campus reads as a group of objects in a grove rather than as a single institutional block, and walking between the buildings under the trees is a substantial part of the experience.

Construction started in 2004. On 29 August 2005 the storm surge carried a casino barge off the water and dropped it onto the unfinished site, destroying work already done. The project was rebuilt and opened in stages: three buildings on the eastern side of the campus in November 2010, and the City of Biloxi Center for Ceramics in September 2012.

That history is not on a plaque in large letters, but it is the reason this campus means something here that a Gehry building elsewhere would not.