At the age of fourteen, Eddie Owens Martin found his way to New York City’s Greenwich Village to pursue a life of adventure and culture, leaving his family’s farm in rural Georgia. Supporting himself as a hustler, fortune teller, and waiter, he relished the company of drag queens, drug dealers, and other eccentric personalities, who became the subjects in his drawings. During an illness in 1935, Martin received his first vision from a futuristic, gender-bending alien who encouraged him to follow the “true way,” the path of a new religion called Pasaquoyanism. Thus, Martin became the world’s first Pasaquoyan and began transitioning his identity from Eddie Owens Martin to St. EOM. He developed his spiritual belief system during his last twelve years of living in New York, and returned to his recently deceased mother’s farm in the late 1950s. There, he worked as a card reader—which he called “the poor man’s psychiatrist”—for members of the local community and devoted himself for the last thirty years of his life to the construction of a seven-acre art environment called Pasaquan.

Valérie Rousseau, exhibition label for Six Decades Collecting Self-Taught Art: Revealing a Diverse and Rich Artistic Narrative. New York: American Folk Art Museum, 2019.