Divining Nature

Born in New Orleans in 1903, Walter Anderson attended boarding school in New York, and spent childhood summers with his family on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. He studied art in New York at Parsons Institute, and graduated from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1929. While working as a designer at his family’s pottery business in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, he became obsessed with depicting the flora and fauna of the coastal region. After 1947, Anderson lived in a small cottage in Ocean Springs, and began to make frequent trips in a small skiff to Horn Island, part of the barrier reef along the Mississippi Gulf Coast. There he camped, slept under his boat, existed on minimal food resources, and over a period of eighteen years made thousands of watercolors of the innumerable resident birds, mammals, insects, and reptiles, as well the various flora and fauna.

This exhibition of a selection of Anderson’s compelling watercolors is from the collection of the Mississippi Museum of Art in Jackson, Mississippi. The installation also featured a group of ceramic pieces designed by Anderson for his family’s pottery. The ceramics are from the collection of the Walter Anderson Museum in Ocean Springs, Mississippi.