150792330Eddie Owens Martin19081986As 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). EddieMartinhttps://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/7375/fullAt 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.(1908–1986)Buena VistaNew YorkBuena VistaNew YorkBuena VistaNew YorkSt. EOMEddie Owens Martin