06/01/2026
This Pride, we honor artists like St. EOM who fought to be seen—and made space for others to do the same. 🏳️🌈
Between growing up in a family of sharecroppers in Marion County, Georgia, and an adulthood spent building a utopian, fantastical religious site called Pasaquan in rural Buena Vista, Georgia, Eddie Owens Martin, later known as St. EOM, lived in New York City. He fled home and hitchhiked to New York at age fourteen, surviving as a fortune teller, drag queen, and s*x worker while exploring the city’s museums and libraries.
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.”
See St. EOM’s work in ‘Self-Made,’ now on view Wednesday–Sunday, 11:30 AM–6 PM, through September 13. Admission is always free!
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🎨Eddie Owens Martin (St. EOM) (1908, Marion County, Georgia–1986, Buena Vista, Georgia), Untitled, Buena Vista, Georgia, 1935–1957, Watercolor and pen on paper, 17 1/4 x 14 in., American Folk Art Museum, New York, Gift of the Columbus State University Foundation and Kohler Foundation, Inc., made possible by Institute 193, 2018.22.3
🎨Eddie Owens Martin (St. EOM) (1908, Marion County, Georgia–1986, Buena Vista, Georgia), Untitled, Buena Vista, Georgia, 1935–1957, Watercolor and pen on paper, 19 5/8 x 14 3/4 in., American Folk Art Museum, New York, Gift of the Columbus State University Foundation and Kohler Foundation, Inc., made possible by Institute 193, 2018.22.1
