Eddie Owens Martin
(1908–1986)
BornGeorgia, United States
ActiveBuena Vista, Georgia, United States
ActiveNew York, New York, United States
BiographyAs the first and only follower of a utopian new religion he called Pasaquoyanism, Eddie Owens Martin spread messages of a better future from a fantastic seven-acre art environment, still standing outside of Buena Vista, Georgia. Martin reinvented himself as St. EOM (pronounced “Om,” as in the traditions of Hinduism), dressed in homemade ceremonial garments, and wore hats decorated with feathers and cowrie shells over his uncut hair. Amidst the pine trees of his family farm, he built pagodas for rituals, connecting them with more than nine hundred feet of masonry walls adorned with concrete sculptures. The opulent, brightly colored, mandala-like patterns that cover this sprawling architecture were informed by Martin’s interest in ancient Mesoamerican, African, and Native American cultures, as well as his belief in the legendary world of Atlantis.Martin was born in 1908 to sharecroppers in rural Marion County, Georgia. At fourteen, he left home and hitchhiked to New York. There he survived as a fortune teller and sex worker while also immersing himself in art at the city’s museums and libraries. At outdoor art markets, he sold his watercolors and pen drawings; many resemble fashion designs, centering on figures in flamboyant outfits likely inspired by the drug dealers and drag queens he encountered living on the urban margins.
In the mid-1930s, while feverishly sick, Martin had visions of beings from the future calling him to be reborn as a “Pasaquoyan.” He returned to Georgia and started work on the Pasaquan site in the mid-1950s. In a 1984 conversation with the artist and collector Willem Volkersz, Martin described “the next new religion that’s going to come into the world. . . . Something’s got to give, something’s got to come up into the world besides what we have now. . . . This organized religion is on the way out—as I can see it—because it doesn’t serve the people’s needs. People need to go back to being natural people, being themselves.”
The Pasaquan Preservation Society was formed to care for the site after Martin’s death, in 1986, and partnered with the Kohler Foundation in 2014 for a major collaborative restoration project. In 2016, Pasaquan and hundreds of Martin’s works were donated to Columbus State University, with the goal of safeguarding St. EOM’s legacy and his dream of using art to create a more beautiful and authentically individual world.
Allison C. Meier, 2025
Text written as part of “Rethinking Biography,” an initiative supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).