Pasaquan and St. EOM - Tri Co. Journal Article

Tri Co. Journal Article

Tuesday, 21 June 2005

Link: http://www.tjournal.com/

Pasaquan to open for tours
By RICHARD HARRIS
(From the June 15, 2005 issue)

Pasaquan -- It's tucked away in the woods on a country road a few miles outside of Buena Vista and has been called one of the most important folk art sites in America by art critics and historians. It could also be called the area's most promising potential tourist attraction, despite the fact that it's in need of repair and is open only on a limited basis.
Pasaquan is the former home of late artist Eddie Owens Martin (also known as "St. EOM") and may be poised to become a more popular tourist attraction thanks to efforts by the Pasaquan Preservation Society.
   One of the first steps in the promotion of the site is the announcement that it will be open for visitors on the last Saturday of the month from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. from now through October. Admission will be $5 per person (free for children 5 and younger).
   It is hoped that this modest opening schedule will be only a very small step to what the site will become, as the Preservation Society has grand visions of restoration and the formation of a legitimate museum that will be open on a regular basis.
   "The Pasaquan Preservation Society has a long-range plan for opening the site as a museum on a regular basis and employing up to six people to run the museum," said Fred Fussel, board member, artist and 'folklorist.' "The goal for opening on a permanent basis is July 4, 2008, which would be St. EOM's 100th birthday."
   While finding the funding for the needed restoration is an uphill battle, Fussell and fellow board members are confident that it can be done.
   "If we can get one or two major funding sources, it's possible," he said.
   An estimated $2.5 million will need to be raised over the next three to five years in order to completely restore the structures at Pasaquan, to construct a visitor's center with adequate restrooms and a small gift shop, and to hire a staff who will establish a variety of educational programs and special events, manage the facility on a daily basis and maintain the buildings and grounds.
   In addition to repair and restoration of the colorful walls, "totem poles" and various other art structures around the main building, the house itself, which was built around 1880, is in need of work. This includes repairs to the roof and addressing some ground water seepage.
   Many local residents may not realize that Pasaquan is often described as an "internationally acclaimed visionary art site" by people all over the world. It - and "St. EOM" - have been featured in dozens of newspaper, magazine, internet and book articles in local, regional and national publications, including the New York Times, Smithsonian Magazine, various international magazines, the San Francisco Chronicle, The New Georgia Guide and others.
   "At least three nationally-aired documentary films or television programs have featured Pasaquan, too," noted Fussell. "BBC television in London featured Pasaquan in a three-hour special on extraordinary art sites around the globe. It was the only site in Georgia to be included.
   New York Times art critic John Russell wrote, "(Pasaquan) was, and doubtless is, an astonishing sight."
   With proper care and promotion, the Preservation Society believes Buena Vista can share this extraordinary place with the world. It's also believed by some to be the key to local economic development.
   "Once it is properly restored and widely advertised, Pasaquan will draw visitors from everywhere and in large numbers," said Fussell. "One of the frustrations of the Pasaquan Board during the past 10 years or more has been the necessity of having to deny the requests of literally thousands of art lovers who wanted to come here and tour the site. But until there has been an adequate stabilization of the buildings and the surrounding grounds, visitor numbers have to be very carefully limited and controlled."
   But if restoration and expansion plans are successful, that is expected to change.
   "The hundreds of visitors who come to see it will shop in Buena Vista, eat here, buy fuel and other supplies here, and so on, just like they do at any tourist center," Fussell said. "In addition to that, preparing and opening the site as a museum and an art facility will create at least a half-dozen full and part-time jobs."
   However, the specific purpose of the project, according to the Preservation Society's official statement, is to: "Use the site of Pasaquan and the associated collection of objects as instruments for educating and inspiring the American public with regard to the capacity of the individual to produce eminently significant achievements through personal acts on innovation, diligence and vision."
   The society is currently pursuing a number of grants and funding possibilities for the project. Of course, donations are appreciated and helpful.
   Local Board members who will be helping with the upcoming tours include: Fred Fussell, John and Penny Rogers, Rocky Wade and Burton Wight. Volunteers would also be appreciated. For more information dial 229-649-6957 or send an email to ffussell@alltel.net




What is Pasaquan?




Just what is "Pasaquan," the celebrated folk art site in Marion County? A portion of a narrative by the Preservation Society is printed below to help answer that question.
   Eddie Owens Martin was born at the stroke of midnight July 4, 1908. His father was a Southwest Georgia dirt farmer, an uneducated sharecropper whose only apparent interest in his son was as a farm laborer who could toil without payment in producing the annual cotton crop. Eddie, however, was "different" from the other five children in the family. Secretly assisted by his mother, he learned to read. He soon contemplated an existence far beyond that of the backbreaking day labor in the fields of Marion County. At fourteen, following an incident during which his father cruelly killed a puppy that Eddie had received as a gift from a neighboring black family, he left home. After wandering around Georgia and Florida for several months as an itinerant fruit picker, young Eddie drifted north. He eventually found New York City, where he stayed until the mid-1950s.
   In New York, Eddie Martin's creative individualism developed beyond that which could scarcely have been imagined by the young farm boy in Georgia. He quickly became a savvy street character in Greenwich Village. He connected with the city's provocative underground culture and the struggling artists, the musicians, the poets, the beggars and bums of lower Manhattan all became members of his newly found family. For more than thirty years he survived in New York, employing whatever means were necessary to get by. He often worked as a fortune teller in Manhattan tea rooms, and he prepared and sold meals of soul food to other displaced Southerners. The New York art scene fed his expanding flamboyant personality and fired his artistic spirit. All the while he was a habitual visitor to the city's museums, libraries, studios, and art galleries. He absorbed New York hip culture like a colorful sponge.
   At a time in the late 1930s, during an extended and fever-ridden illness, Martin experienced the first of a series of phenomenal visions that would prompt and continue to drive his artistic efforts for the rest of his life. In the initial vision, he was confronted by a trio of extraordinarily tall personages who identified themselves as people of the future -- special envoys from a vaporous land called Pasaquan, a place where the past, the present, the future, and everything else all come together." He had been chosen by them, he later reported, to delineate an understanding of the peace and beauty that the future might hold for mankind, if mankind would take heed. On that day, Eddie Owens Martin of Marion County, Georgia, became St. EOM -- the one and only Pasaquoyan of the Twentieth Century.
   The empowered visitors in his vision offered him extensive instructions on how to ritually prepare for the proper conduct of his personal daily existence. They revealed how he was to communicate with and receive cosmic instruction from the energies of the universe, and how to follow a course that would enable him to artfully render the futuristic world of Pasaquan in paint and pen, metal and concrete. The most compelling instruction that he received from them was this: To "return to Georgia and do something." That is precisely what he did -- for over 30 years.
   The result is St. EOM's PASAQUAN.
   Its creator, the late Eddie Owens Martin (AKA "St. EOM") said: "I built this place to have something to identify with. Here I can be in my own world ... have my own thoughts. I don't have nothing against other people and their beliefs. I'm not asking anybody to do my way or be my way."

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