Re: Pasaquan & Saint EOM

Will Dockery wrote:

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Pasaquan and Saint EOM:
<http://www.pasaquan.com/>

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https://web.archive.org/web/20020820121848/http://www.pasaquan.com/
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LINK CORRECTED ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
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<http://www.rawvision.com/back/steom/steom.html>
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Posted on Wed, Jun. 22, 2005 from
<http://www.ledger-enquirer.com/mld/ledgerenquirer/>
Peace, love and art
Eddie Owens Martin had a vision of a place packed with peace and love
and art, a place where race did not matter and for that matter, neither
did sex. It was a place with lots of love.
"Lots of love, lots of peace," says Fred Fussell of the Pasaquan
Preservation Society, the Marion County group now charged with keeping
Martin's vision alive years after the artist passed on. "There would be
no discrimination of any kind," Fussell says of Martin's vision.
"Everybody would be interested in the arts, and in peace and love and
all that."
So there should be lots of peace, love and art to enjoy Saturday as the
preservation society reopens Martin's place to the public. The 7-acre
art compound has been off-limits to all but special tour groups for
three years now, which may explain recent shortages of peace and love.
Deep in the pines outside Buena Vista, Pasaquan is the realization of a
vision Martin had in New York in the 1930s, while ill and running a
fever. He saw a tall trio from the future who told him they came from a
place called Pasaquan, where the past, the present, the future and
everything else all come together. They told him to go home to Georgia
and "do something." He did.
The son of a white sharecropper, Martin had left home after seeing his
daddy kill a puppy a black family had given the 14-year-old Eddie.
Eventually he drifted to New York City and found a new family among the
castaways of Greenwich Village. He sucked up the city's art culture and
became a flamboyant character, calling himself "St. EOM" after his
feverish vision of the future.
Then he came home to Georgia, to do something. He built Pasaquan out of
an 1880s farm. He raised walls of concrete around it, and built faces
and symbols and figures into the walls. He made them shine in bright
colors with oil-based house paint.
In 1986 the artist and fortune-teller saw that an illness was going to
kill him, so he killed himself first. He left behind not only 15,650
square feet of painted art that forms Pasaquan's outer shell, but also
more than 2,000 individual pieces of art: oil and watercolor paintings,
ink and pencil drawings, sculptures and costumes.
He left it all to the Marion County Historical Society, which in 1987
tried to give it to the Columbus Museum, which in 1989 turned it down.
Since then, Martin's work has been exhibited in the National Museum of
American Art, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Museum of American
Folk Art, The Library of Congress, the Contemporary Arts Center in
Seattle and other institutions.
Art more easily endures in a museum or gallery than out in the woods.
Maintaining a place made out of peace, love, concrete, metal, wood and
house paint is a challenge.
Part of the reason the preservation society is inviting the public back
to Pasaquan 10-4 p.m. Saturday is not only to make a few bucks --
admission will be $5 for all who aren't children age 5 or younger --
but also to publicize its plight.
Formed within the Marion County Historical Society in the early 1990s,
the preservation society took possession of Pasaquan in 2003. It has
picked up a few grants to do some repair and repainting, but it hasn't
the estimated $1.5 million needed to fully restore and preserve
everything Martin left behind.
The organization hopes that again having public events at Pasaquan will
be good public relations, teaching people about the place and its
meaning.
The folks familiar with it never seem to lose interest. Fussell says
they ask about it a lot, and call to try to set up special visits --
everyone from Columbus State University art students to soccer teams.
"There was a woman from LaGrange who brought a group of graduating high
school seniors as her graduation gift to one of the girls," he says.
"The girl got to invite 10 of her friends to come along. We've had
several classes from LaGrange College and from CSU to the place."
Recently the sponsor of a soccer team in Columbus for a tournament
tried to take some players out to tour Pasaquan but couldn't fit the
trip in.
Preservationists hope reopening Pasaquan on the last Saturday of each
month this summer will help reconnect people with Martin and his work.
"The ultimate goal is to have the place pretty much restored if we
possibly can and open on a regular basis, almost a daily basis, by the
Fourth of July, 2008, which would be Eddie Martin's 100th birthday,"
Fussell says.
It would honor the life of a poor farm boy who left home with nothing
and came home with a vision.
"I built this place to have somethin' to identify with, 'cause there's
nothin' that I see in this world that I identify with or desire to
emulate," Martin once told a biographer. "Here I can be in my own world
with my temples and designs and the spirit of God."
His world of peace, love and art still awaits the future out in woods
near Buena Vista. And where else around here now can you find peace,
love and art all in one place?
-Tim Chitwood

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https://web.archive.org/web/20020820121848/http://www.pasaquan.com/