exhibition
Opening Nov. 8: EDDIE OWENS MARTIN, Drawing Between Worlds

About the exhibition

EDDIE OWENS MARTIN
Drawing Between Worlds: St. EOM's New York Odyssey, 1930 - 1950
November 8 - December 14, 2025

Curated by Michael McFalls & Charles Fowler
Director & Project Coordinator of Pasaquan 

Opening Events: Saturday, Nov. 8, 4 - 6pm
4pm - Panel Discussion with Michael McFalls, Charles Fowler & Annie Moye
5pm - Levitation Ceremony by Travis Dodd
Reception to follow until 6pm
 

Drawing Between Worlds: The Visionary Art of St. EOM

In the archives of Columbus State University (Columbus, GA), there are roughly 1,200 drawings made by Eddie Owens Martin. Many of these drawings were created while he was living in New York City from the 1930s through the mid-1950s. They are not studies or careful observational sketches but rapid notations of a cosmic development. They were created with the enthusiasm that I would associate with automatic writing or mediumistic drawing. Yet Martin was not channeling spirits in the traditional sense; he was birthing a universe, a utopian future, one drawing at a time. The drawings are divine. They are mantric. They are the visual equivalent of speaking in tongues. Martin was establishing his own world, where he could be himself. As a queer man in mid-century America, living on society's margins, each drawing represented independence from a world that offered little space to those who experienced visions and lived alternative lifestyles.

The materials themselves tell their own story—often just pencil or pen on whatever paper or cardboard scrap was available. These drawings were made in the margins of a marginal existence, squeezed between fortune-telling sessions and sex work, visions captured in rented rooms, borrowed spaces, or in his apartment when he was alone. Yet this material modesty only amplifies their power. Unencumbered by the preciousness of fine art materials or formal training, Martin was free to use drawing as a direct pipeline to his revelations.

The relationship between these drawings and Martin's first 1935 vision is important to address. During a near-death experience, he claims he encountered what he described as a massive deity-like figure who told him it was the end of the road for him unless he changed his ways. This encounter initiated his transformation into St. EOM, but it would take decades for Martin to fully comprehend the vision. The many New York drawings from the CSU archives can be understood as Martin's attempt to process this, to give form to what had been revealed to him in that liminal state between life and death. In these works, I observe the gradual evolution of the Pasaquoyan, the development of elaborate headdresses, cosmic beings, and guardian figures, which would later become the visual vocabulary of his 7-acre art environment in rural Marion County, Georgia.

There's an urgency to these drawings that you can't fake. The lines move as if Martin's hand were being guided by something faster than thought. This isn't careful rendering—it's channeling. The technical approach is revelatory: lines are swift but choppy. There's no labored modeling of form through shadow and light. Instead, Martin developed a kind of spiritual shorthand, a way of capturing essentials for the Pasaquoyan aesthetic. And yet, there's also incredible control here. Each mark knows exactly where it needs to be. The process of creating these works was both an escape from the constraints of everyday life and an affirmation of his spiritual vision.

These drawings function for Martin as an otherworldly technology. The lines have a vibrating quality, as if each stroke resonates with energy. The first time I saw them, I could sense the urgency behind each drawing. It's through this making process that Martin transforms his vision into a concrete and now shared perceptual experience. It is here that he brings the ethereal world of Pasaquan to life. Consider when you're trying to understand something complex—you might, as most artists do, diagram it out and sketch it repeatedly until it makes sense. Martin was doing that, but with an entire universe. These aren't studies for Pasaquan; they're the big bang where the Pasaquoyan is born, where the gender-fluid beings of the future are created, and the culture develops. All this makes sense if you consider his New York years. Martin moved through the city's underground cultures where identity was fluid, performed, and continually reinvented. The drag queens, hustlers, and outcasts who formed his community understood that identity was constructed rather than inherited. In drawing image after image, Martin was not simply observing this phenomenon but participating in it on an intense cosmic level. Each drawing represents both a shedding of Eddie Owens Martin and an emergence of St. EOM, the world's first Pasaquoyan.

The faces that dominate these drawings defy categorization. They are neither portraits of individuals nor generic types, but something altogether more androgynous—liminal figures echoing the fever dream works of Hieronymus Bosch or Frida Kahlo. They are fantastical and symbolic creatures, capturing an otherworldly and surreal quality. They feel deeply personal for Martin but are universally rich and resonant for us today. Some of Martin's faces stare out with eyes that see through time; others turn in profile, their features dissolving into patterns and symbols. At times, their hair rises to architectural heights; beards split and spiral up the sides of their faces and features multiply and merge. These are not depictions of people but possibilities; each Pasaquoyan is a meditation on what humans might become when freed from conventional limitations.

The dancers that appear throughout these works seem liberated from physical laws and at times sexual mores. Their bodies twist, elongate, and fragment, caught in movements that seem to originate from some unearthly choreography and unfamiliar sexual ecstasy. Arms multiply, torsos spiral, legs dissolve into rhythms pulsing from an unknown world. The Pasaquoyans, especially the dancers, remind me of (decades before he existed) Ziggy Stardust—psychedelic, androgynous, extraterrestrial. At times, these figures don't simply dance through space; they generate it, and in moments of cosmic sex, merge into one another, bodies caught in each other's gravitational pull.

After 14 years of looking at these drawings, years of returning to them, what still sometimes surprises me is their relationship to time. They're ancient and futuristic simultaneously, pulling from West African imagery and Native American patterns while invoking beings that seem to come from another galaxy. This scrambling of time is intentional for Martin. He understood something that physics is just catching up to: linear time might be an illusion, and past and future might be accessible together, if you know how to look and where to find it.

Unlike the permanent sculptures at Pasaquan, which were meant to endure, these works on paper and cardboard capture fleeting moments of vision. They possess the quality of dream journals, capturing images that might otherwise dissolve if not recorded quickly after a dream or vision. It was radical for St. EOM to create this work in New York during the 1930s, '40s, and '50s. While Abstract Expressionism explored existential, high modernist themes through paint-splattered canvases and color field meditations, Martin was in the Village envisioning entire civilizations and gender-fluid beings from the future. While the mainstream art world debated form and the picture plane, arguing over the flatness of the canvas and the purity of abstraction, Martin drew portals to another dimension. He wasn't interested in reducing art to its formal elements but in expanding it to encompass whole worlds, populated by beings who moved freely between genders, wearing elaborate headdresses and ceremonial garments that suggest rituals from civilizations yet to come.

This radical creativity is what moves me—what continues to draw me back after all these years. Every single drawing is an act of defiance against a world that wanted Eddie Owens Martin to disappear. As a queer man, as a fortune teller, as someone who claimed visions and spoke of alternate realities, St. EOM existed at the intersection of multiple taboos in mid-century America. There were numerous social agencies designed to force people like him into invisibility or conformity. But instead of disappearing, he transformed himself. Instead of being silenced, he created his own language. Instead of accepting the reality he was given, he drew new realities into existence. The repetition in these works—face after face, dancer after dancer—isn't redundancy. It's insistence. It's Martin saying: "This is real. This is real. This is real." Each iteration making solid what was once nonexistent.

Reflecting on my own moments of feeling outside, of not fitting in, I see in Martin's drawings a roadmap—not for escape, but for transformation. For artists like St. EOM, art is a cosmological construction. It's building the world you need to survive. Through the accumulation of drawn faces and figures, St. EOM was populating a universe, establishing its laws, and defining its inhabitants. The Pasaquoyan realm, which would later manifest as a vernacular art environment in rural Marion County, was first developed in these two-dimensional explorations, line by line, face by face.

In this exhibition, "Drawing Between Worlds," we get to see St. EOM in the act of becoming—not the stoic chief of Pasaquan but the searcher, the receiver, the vessel out of which these visions were drawn. These drawings are the record of the urgency of making. They remind me that creation isn't always pretty or precious—sometimes it's desperate and necessary. What these drawings reveal is that reality is more negotiable than we think, that identity is more fluid than we imagine, and that art can be a technology for accessing worlds we didn't know existed. St. EOM figured this out through his artistic practice. He lived it. These drawings are evidence.

- Michael McFalls is a professor of art at Columbus State University in Columbus, Georgia, and Director of Pasaquan.

Special thanks to Columbus State University, The Pasaquan Preservation Society and Ruth Arts for supporting this exhibition.