🚀 go-pugleaf

On Saturday, June 25, 2005 at 12:40:55 AM UTC-4, Will Dockery wrote:
>
> Pasaquan and Saint EOM:
> <http://www.pasaquan.com/>
> <http://www.rawvision.com/back/steom/steom.html>
> ----
> 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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