exhibition
Eddie Owens Martin, Drawing Between Worlds

About the exhibition

EDDIE OWENS MARTIN
Drawing Between Worlds: New York Odyssey, 1930 - 1950
November 8 - December 14, 2025

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

Drawing Between Worlds: St. EOM's New York Odyssey
This exhibition at Kentler International Drawing Space unveils a rarely seen collection of drawings by Eddie Owens Martin, the visionary artist who transformed himself into St. EOM and created Pasaquan, the legendary seven-acre art environment in rural Georgia. Discovered in the archives of Columbus State University, these intimate sketches and portraits offer an unprecedented window into the formative years that shaped one of the American South's most fascinating self-taught artistic visionaries.

Born in Marion County, Georgia, in 1908, Martin left his family's farm at the age of fourteen. He hit the streets of New York City, where he immersed himself in the city's underground culture during his transformative years. He worked as a hustler, fortune teller, and waiter, moving through circles of drag queens, street performers, and fellow outcasts. Society’s edge became the subject of his obsessive portrait studies.

In 1935, a vision revealed Martin's calling as St. EOM, the world's first Pasaquoyan saint. This spiritual awakening infused his artistic practice with new urgency and purpose. The drawings from this period were created primarily between 1935 and 1960. They capture an extraordinary creative metamorphosis—portraits that dissolve boundaries between earthly reality and cosmic fantasy, fashion designs for imagined spiritual regalia, and character studies charged with divine revelation. Each work has the energy of an artist discovering his singular visual vocabulary. This vision would later evolve into the psychedelic wonderland of Pasaquan.

Drawing Between Worlds illuminates a pivotal yet under-examined chapter in St. EOM's remarkable odyssey—from rural farm boy to urban mystic to self-proclaimed southern saint—revealing how New York's underground shaped the consciousness of one of America's most extraordinary outsider artists.

- Michael McFalls