George Edgar Ohr (July 12, 1857 – April 7, 1918) was an American ceramic artist and the self-proclaimed "Mad Potter of Biloxi." In recognition of his innovative experimentation with modern clay forms from 1880–1910, some^[who?] consider him the father of the American Abstract-Expressionism movement.^{[citation needed]}

George Ohr was born in Biloxi, Mississippi, on July 12, 1857. He was the son of German immigrants who arrived in New Orleans c. 1850 and subsequently married and moved to Biloxi. George Ohr tried his hand a various trades before he became interested in ceramics in 1879, while an apprentice of Joseph Fortune Meyer. Ohr married Josephine Gehring of New Orleans on September 15, 1886. Ten children were born to the Ohrs, but unfortunately only five survived to adulthood. George Ohr died of throat cancer on April 7, 1918.

Ohr studied the potter's trade with Joseph Meyer in New Orleans, a potter whose family hailed from Alsace-Lorraine, as did Ohr's. Ohr's father had established the first blacksmith shop in Biloxi and his mother ran an early, popular grocery store there. In his lifetime, Ohr created well over 10,000 known pots. He was a showman of the style of P.T. Barnum, a contemporary.^{[says who?]} Ohr was an American figure at the turn of the 20th century. He called his work "unequaled, undisputed, unrivaled." In 1884, Ohr exhibited and sold his pottery at the World's Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition in New Orleans. Of the hundreds of pieces he showed, Ohr boasted "no two alike."

Frank Owen Gehry, CC (born Frank Owen Goldberg; February 28, 1929) is a Canadian American Pritzker Prize-winning architect based in Los Angeles, California.

His buildings, including his private residence, have become tourist attractions. His works are cited as being among the most important works of contemporary architecture in the 2010 World Architecture Survey, which led Vanity Fair to label him as "the most important architect of our age".

Gehry's best-known works include the titanium-covered Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain; MIT Stata Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts; Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles; Experience Music Project in Seattle; Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis; Dancing House in Prague; the Vitra Design Museum and MARTa Museum in Germany; the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto; the Cinémathèque française in Paris; and 8 Spruce Street in New York City. But it was his private residence in Santa Monica, California, which jump-started his career, lifting it from the status of "paper architecture" – a phenomenon that many famous architects have experienced in their formative decades through experimentation almost exclusively on paper before receiving their first major commission in later years. Gehry is also the designer of the future Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial.