Pasaquan: After Extended Conservation Efforts, Georgia's Visionary Art Site Reopens

As the official state museum of art, the Georgia Museum of Art is fundamentally engaged with artistic developments happening throughout the state of Georgia. Recently, Pasaquan, an important Georgian visionary art site, has reopened. Located in rural Georgia, about seven miles outside of Buena Vista and about 30 miles outside of Columbus, Pasaquan is a psychedelic, pseudo-religious art complex featuring over 900 feet of painted walls and situated on more than seven acres of land. The site was conceived of and constructed by visionary artist Eddie Owens Martin (or St. EOM as he referred to himself) in the late 1950s. After St. EOM’s death in 1986 the site fell into relative disrepair with fading paint and structural concerns, but as of October 2016, the environment has been reopened to the public in a newly restored form, now reflecting its original state and Owens’s original artistic vision.

Pasaquan, 2017. Photo: Hillary Brown

“I’d recommend people go ‘while the paint’s fresh.’ That’s what Alan Rothschild, the chair of the museum’s Board of Advisors and a Columbus resident, told me, and I think it was smart advice.” 

Eddie Owens Martin

Owens was born in Buena Vista, Georgia, in 1908 to a poor sharecropping family. He ran away at age 14 to live in New York City where he first began studying and creating art. In his 20s, Owens experienced the first of his fever-induced dreams in which he was visited by giant figures from the future. In this first vision, the figures told him, “You’re gon’ be the start of somethin’ new, and you’ll call yourself Saint EOM, and you’ll be a Pasaquoyan — the first one in the world.” In 1957 after his mother’s death, the newly consecrated St. EOM moved back to his mother’s 18th century farmhouse and there began constructing the Pasaquan site onto existing structures. St. EOM explained that he “built this place to have something to identify with. Here I can be in my own world, with my temples and designs and the spirit of God. I can have my own spirits and my own thoughts.”

St. EOM (Eddie Owens Martin). Photo: Columbus State University

Pasaquan

St. EOM’s Pasaquoyan aesthetic and spiritualism is defined by an interesting blend of various cultural motifs. His wall paintings reference both eastern and western major religions, featuring large-scale mandalas and crosses. He used masonry and bright colors to depict human forms and geometric patterns, a practice reminiscent of the bright colors and angular geometry found in ancient Aztec and other pre-Columbian works of art. He was also inspired by Edward Churchward’s writing on the fabled “Lost Continent of Mu” and the concept of a singular and peaceful ancient civilization. He created Pasaquan as a representation of his optimistic vision of the future as a cultural blend of peoples in a state of bright and fantastic unity. St. EOM has stated that his one-man religion, Pasaquoyanism, “has to do with the Truth, and with Nature, and the Earth, and man’s lost rituals.”¹ He funded and built Pasaquan almost single-handedly with money he received from fortune-telling.

Great Goddess mural from the site of Teotihuacán, Mexico. St. EOM's work resembles
that of the ancient Aztecs and Mesoamericans. Image: Wikipedia

Unfortunately, although skilled, St. EOM was not a trained construction worker and painter, and much of his work was left damaged after long exposure to the elements. When he passed away in 1986, the Pasaquan Preservation Society (PPS) took over the site in a non-profit effort to conserve this valuable work of art. Despite continuous efforts, the PPS lacked the funds to properly conserve the complex and it gradually deteriorated. In 2014, the Kohler Foundation stepped in to help with the renovations, bringing conservators from all over the U.S. to help with termite damage, fading paint and structural concerns in each of the six main buildings and surrounding walls. The project took roughly two years to complete and in late 2015, the conservators completed the process and donated the site to Columbus State University, which now oversees its preservation.

Wall under conservation, 2015. Photo: David Anderson, Columbus State University Archives

After conservation, 2017. Photo: Hillary Brown

Pasaquan is currently open for public visits from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays. The site is closed during holidays and for the months of December and July. Visitors are asked for a suggested contribution of $10 for adults, $5 for seniors and $3 for students. Hillary Brown, our director of communications, recently visited the renovated site after wanting to visit for years. “I’m really glad I waited until after the restoration was complete. It’s a truly special place and worth a long drive from anywhere,” Hillary recounts, “I’d recommend people go ‘while the paint’s fresh.’ That’s what Alan Rothschild, the chair of the museum’s Board of Advisors and a Columbus resident, told me, and I think it was smart advice.”

Jamie Brener 

Publications Intern

¹ Tom Patterson, St. EOM in the Land of Pasaquan: The Life and Time and Art of Eddie Owens Martin (Jargon Society: Winston-Salem, North Carolina, 1987).

19th Century Mourning Embroideries Currently on Display in “Georgia’s Girlhood Embroidery: ‘Crowned with Glory and Immortality’”

Included in the new exhibition “Georgia’s Girlhood Embroidery: ‘Crowned with Glory and Immortality’” (on view at the Georgia Museum of Art through Feb. 28, 2016; co-organized by Kathleen Staples and Dale Couch) are three mourning samplers, which are somewhat unusual. Exhibited just outside the gallery is Mary Jane Smithey’s silk mourning embroidery picture, which combines watercolor painting with embroidery done in silk floss on a plain silk background. Smithey’s work is characteristic of the type of mourning embroideries done during the Federal period and the decades immediately following. Samplers, on the other hand, were preferred for instructional, rather than commemorative purposes, yet, as the three examples in our exhibition show, it was not unheard of for a schoolgirl or even an adult woman to make an embroidered record of her loss using counted thread techniques rather than the graceful couched satin stitches that filled out the drawn-on outlines of most mourning embroideries.

Smithey’s embroidery shows two neoclassical urns, graced by mourning women, in front of a church in a pastoral landscape. One urn, by which Mary Jane herself seems to be depicted, honors her father, Robert Scott Smithey; the other urn, beside which an unidentified women sits, honors her maternal grandparents, William and Mary Hewlett. Completed around 1825, Smithey’s embroidery is a typical example of schoolgirl mourning embroideries. Either she or her instructor would have drawn on the design and painted in the faces and other details, as well as the background, while Smithey would have embroidered the larger features in couching stitch, French knots and outline, single, and split stitches using silk thread for the majority of the design and silk chenille for the leaves. Smithey’s embroidery reflects both the neoclassical style and the “cult of mourning” popular in her day. Unlike the memorial embroideries on display as part of the exhibition, Smithey’s embroidery was made in Richmond, Virginia, and brought to Georgia by her daughter in 1860.

Mary Jane Smithey's memorial to her father and grandparents

Caroline Broughton Fabian, a wealthy planter’s daughter from St. Simons Island, Georgia, also followed popular fashion with her mourning sampler, dedicated to the memory of George Washington and dated October 8, 1803. After Washington’s death, it became popular for schoolgirls to commemorate him in mourning embroideries as an exercise in patriotism. What is unusual about Fabian’s embroidery is its format. Most Washington memorials were done in the style of Smithey’s embroidery, instead of as part of a counted thread instructional sampler. Fabian’s sampler begins with the alphabet, as is usual for instructional samplers, but then goes on to include the following verse:

Columbia’s fair daughters forever shall mourn
While Genius stands weeping at Washington’s Urn.
Let hope still support you, fair daughters arise
In faith that your Washington’s soar’d to the skies,
Where still as your guardian he’ll ever preside
To virtue and goodness the pole star and guide.

Davida Deutsch identified this verse as being first anonymously published on July 15, 1800, in the New Hampshire Gazette, and its appearance on a south Georgia sampler is evidence of the wide diffusion of ideas and literature in the Federal period. Fabian goes on to note proudly that it has been 28 years since American independence, and that the sampler was made in the “State of Georgia.”

Caroline Broughton Fabian's sampler

The combination instructional sampler/memorial to the deceased is also found in a sampler by an unidentified maker that combines the alphabet with an embroidered epitaph to Joseph Smith, who died in 1840 in Decatur County, located in southwest Georgia. His family’s names are also included on the sampler (his wife Nancy Ann Smith, his son Francis Marion Smith, and his daughter Martha Washington Smith) as well as the initials of some yet to be identified relatives, making this sampler a family record as well. Smith's epitaph is flanked by two cross-stitched weeping willows, which symbolize mourning. It is probable that either Smith’s wife or his daughter made this instructional/memorial/family record sampler.

Unidentified family member, memorial to Joseph Smith

A more elaborate example of the memorial tribute sampler is the “Tribute to the Memory of Cosmo P. Richardsone,” made in 1852 in Savannah to honor the late Dr. Richardsone, who was known as the best doctor in Savannah. Upon his death, Henry Rootes Jackson, a politician and well-known poet, composed a poem in his honor. It is unknown who copied that poem onto this memorial sampler, but likely suspects are Richardsone’s widow, Elizabeth, or his daughter Margaret. The careful use of punctuation, unusual in samplers, suggests that it was copied directly from the original manuscript, and the use of brightly dyed wool thread instead of silk is typical of needlework done after 1850.

Unidentified family member, memorial to Cosmo Richardsone 

     

Olivia Winifred Jordan's Sampler: An Statement of Educational Accomplishment and Familial Identity

Olivia Winifred Jordan's Sampler

In around 1828, a young girl, born in 1818, made a sampler that will be a part of the upcoming exhibition "Georgia's Girlhood Embroidery: 'Crowned with Glory and Immortality,'" which will run from October 31, 2015, to February 28, 2016 at the Georgia Museum of Art. Her name was Olivia Winifred Jordan, and she lived in rural Washington County, Georgia. 

Like many young girls of the 18th and 19th centuries, she made an embroidery sampler to demonstrate her needlework skills and her literacy. It contains multiple kinds of marking alphabets, many different kinds of decorative geometric bands and a strawberry border that goes around the entire sampler, which are all utterly commonplace to schoolgirl samplers in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. In this sense, the surviving sampler is a relic of the system of girlhood education common in a bygone era. Olivia could have been trained in these skills at any one of the many female academies in Georgia, or, most likely, at home by her own mother. 

In another sense, her sampler offers us a glimpse into her unique world. She proudly prints her whole name as "Olivia Winefred Jordan" on the bottom of her sampler. Genealogical research reveals that she was named after both her maternal grandmother, Olivia Bell, and her paternal grandmother, Winifred Jordan. Further research on the family reveals that it was large, extended and close-knit and that family members frequently moved long distances to live with their relatives, a pattern that promoted the entire family's unified migration across the South over the generations. Olivia's sampler clearly reflects this family-centered identity. It also reflects the common way in which samplers and other forms of schoolgirl embroidery were often used to communicate social, political, familial and religious messages. 

Olivia's sampler, then, represents a microcosm of the world that she inhabited, both as a member of her family and as a white middle-class schoolgirl in the antebellum southern United States. It is both a work of folk art and a statement of social identity and is therefore valuable to both those who appreciate art and those who study social history. Those interested in delving more deeply into this topic should take time to visit the museum when the exhibition will be on display. A kit that contains the chart and the material necessary to replicate Olivia's sampler will also be on sale at the Museum Shop during the duration of the exhibition. 

Artist Spotlight: Elayne Goodman

What do Julia Roberts, Nicolas Cage and the Georgia Museum of Art all have in common? They all love and own works by folk artist Elayne Goodman.

Goodman didn’t always have a base of celebrity followers. She came from humble beginnings, born in 1940 in Columbus, Mississippi. Growing up on a farm outside Columbus, Goodman always had a knack for creating unique object, but never considered her work “art” as she had never seen anything similar to compare it to. She spent much of her adult life supporting her family as a surgical nurse but soon returned to school to study her real passion: art.

Goodman credits some aspects of her work to having been born during the Great Depression. During this era, materials were limited, and people had to work with what they had, an influence that continued even after the US economy recovered. She continues to use anything available—wood, fabrics, paint, buttons and beads—to make her art. She can take even the simplest object and turn it into something colorful and intricate.

Today, she has created more than 3,000 works of art and continues to make more. The Georgia Museum of Art is fortunate to have one of her pieces, “American Flag,” detailed with buttons and beads and currently on display on the Patsy Dudley Pate Balcony.

Wrapped Together: Creative Growth Art Center and Judith Scott

On 24th Street in Oakland, Calif., sits the world’s first and largest art studio for adults with disabilities. Creative Growth Art Center was established in 1974 and currently has around 150 artists who have mental and/or physical disabilities in its studios. Professional artists teach classes, and the center hosts exhibitions to showcase the art created. One of the most famous among the center’s artists, both past and present, is Judith Scott.

Scott and her twin sister, Joyce, were born in 1943 in Cincinnati, Ohio. Born with Down syndrome and later struck deaf by scarlet fever, Judith was considered to be severely retarded and spent 30 years of her life in a state institution. In 1985, Joyce moved Judith from the institution in Ohio to a group home in California so that the sisters could be closer. Through a state program that allowed disabled adults opportunities to learn, the Scott sisters found Creative Growth.

The first two years Judith Scott spent at the center were fruitless. She showed little interest in creating art. In one of the classes at Creative Growth, however, professional artist Sylvia Seventy introduced her to the use of fibers and textiles in art, and things took off from there.  Until her death, in 2005, Scott created more than 200 sculptures from yard and “found” items. Scott would tightly wrap and tie layers upon layers of yarn on different items and create colorful, intricate sculptures, some of which were as big as she was. No two pieces are alike, either in structure or color scheme. Her art was how she communicated, and it is as original as she was.

Permanent collections of Judith Scott’s work can be found at Washington State University, the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco, the Museum of American Folk Art in New York City, the Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art in Chicago and the Oakland Museum of California. Internationally, her work can be found in museums in Switzerland, Paris, Prague, Ireland and England. This year, the Brooklyn Museum in Brooklyn, N.Y., is hosting the exhibition “Judith Scott—Bound and Unbound” until March 29. Currently, the Georgia Museum of Art does not own any pieces by Scott.

You can read more about Creative Growth at creativegrowth.org and about Judith and Joyce Scott on their website, judithandjoycescott.com. The photos used in this post are from the sculpture gallery and the artist gallery on their website.

Jim Clark visits "All Creatures"

Our exhibition "All Creatures Great and Small" is still on view at Hartsfield Jackson Atlanta International Airport through April 2012 (across from T gates 12 through 14), and if you haven't made time to go see it yet while passing through the airport, please do. Our photographs don't convey what fun it is. Jim Clark, who created the pike he's posing with above, and his wife, Jean Walbridge, recently sent us these pictures of their visit to the exhibition. She also informed us that the Folk Art Society of America is having its conference in Atlanta next year (Oct. 11-15) and is planning a trip to GMOA. We'll be excited to see the attendees! Thank you, Jim and Jean, for letting us know you enjoyed seeing the exhibition.

GMOA's Booth at Folk Fest 2011

Mary Koon and I had an adventuresome day yesterday setting up our table at Folk Fest! But, it turned out great and will hopefully catch people's eye and attention. We want as many as Folk Art buffs as possible to know about "All Creatures Great and Small" at the Hartsfield-Jackson Airport.

Here are some pictures of the booth. More pictures to come of my adventures at Folk Fest!

– Jenny Williams, PR Coordinator

Folk Fest

Slotin Folk Art's annual Folk Fest begins tomorrow (Friday, Aug. 19) at the North Atlanta Trade Center in Norcross and continues through the weekend. Friday admission costs $15, but you get a T-shirt and free weekend readmission. Folk Fest is always a lot of fun, and this year GMOA has a table (which two of our staff members are setting up right now) to promote "All Creatures Great and Small." Stop by and pick up a brochure!

All Creatures Evidence

Our director was passing through the Atlanta airport this week and made his way over to the T Gates, where our exhibition "All Creatures Great and Small" is on view until April 2012. He snapped some photos with his phone, so you can see how it looks on display, with the video running.

If you're heading out on exciting journeys any time soon, please stop by the T Gallery and take a look. If you email us your photos at gmoapr@yahoo.com, we'll post them here.

GMOA Exhibition Travels to Hartsfield-Jackson Airport

Part of the Airport Art Program, Department of Aviation, Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, “All Creatures Great and Small,” a special exhibition from the Georgia Museum of Art’s permanent collection and the collection of Carl Mullis, features works of art depicting animals created by self-taught American artists. Paintings, sculptures and mixed-media creations by such folk masters as Howard Finster and Mose Tolliver and by such outstanding but relatively unheralded contemporary artists as Jim Lewis and Ted Gordon will soon be on display in the Atlanta airport’s T gates. The majority of artists featured have spent their lives in the South, including the following artists from Georgia: Michael Crocker, Finster, Willie Jinks, R.A. Miller and O.L. Samuels. Watch here for news on when the exhibition will be open.

Slotin Folk Art Festival this Weekend

Photo courtesy of slotinfolkart.com

Got a taste for folk art?

This Saturday and Sunday, nearly 1,200 works of self-taught art will be auctioned off at the Slotin Folk Art Auction in Buford, Ga. Pieces include southern folk pottery, African American quilts and decorative arts, Appalachian art, American Indian pieces, art from the civil rights struggle, religious art, furniture, photography, industrial molds and antique and anonymous folk art.

The festival begins at 10 a.m. on Saturday and noon on Sunday at Historic Buford Hall, 112 E. Shadburn Ave., Buford, GA 30518.

For more information, please visit the event's website.

Ed Welch

The world of folk art is buzzing about its latest gem: Ed Welch. He has gained attention for his visual biographical portrayals of influential African American figures. Most likely deriving from his early career as a sign maker, Welch’s works are poster-like collages painted on cardboard or wood and decorated with enamel and shiny contact paper.

An exhibition of his work is currently on display at the Ricco Maresca Gallery in New York City. For more information, check out this article and pictures from Flavorwire.

Art Around Athens (and farther...)

This Saturday (Oct. 10), in addition to a football game, there is a reception and talks by participating artists at the Madison Museum of Fine Art, in Madison, Ga., for the exhibition Making Masters: Selected Works by MFA Students at the Lamar Dodd School of Art at UGA. The exhibition includes works by nine young artists: Doug Barton, Denton Crawford, Jody Fang, Helen Farmer, Craig Hawkins, Layet Johnson, An Pham, Marie Porterfield and Chase Westfall, all of whom are second-year students in the Lamar Dodd School of Art's MFA program. The exhibition was organized by Dr. Asen Kirin and installed by Jeffrey Whittle, both of whom have strong GMOA connections.

Also Saturday, from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m., at Buffalo's Southwest Café (in the Beechwood Shopping Center) is a one-day art show and sale put on by the Athens Art Association to celebrate its 90th anniversary. Browse through the selection of paintings, prints, fiber art, photographs and more or participate in the silent auction.

And finally, opening at 10:30 a.m. and going until at least 9 p.m., you can also hit up the North Georgia Folk Festival on Saturday at Sandy Creek Park. The festival is mostly known for its showcasing of traditional music, but there are also numerous art and craft demonstrations and vendors, including Cotton Patch Quilters, Peter Loose, Jim Richardson, Jamie Calkin, Will Langford, Charlie Rakestraw and Susan Staley. Admission is $10 per person for adults, $5 for students and free for kids under 12.

We don't know of anything in particular going on Friday or Sunday (let us know if you do), but Saturday looks to be busy!

Mark Your Calendars

Thursday, Sept. 10, may be a few weeks away, but you should go ahead and make a note that, at 2 p.m., Paul Manoguerra, curator of American art, will be giving a public tour of Lord Love You: Works by R.A. Miller from the Mullis Collection, at the Lyndon House Arts Center. Paul ran the staff and some docents through the exhibition right after it opened (as the slideshow above documents), and while his wall text and the exhibition catalogue are wonderful, the opportunity to hear him expand (on, for example, Bireley's Orange) and the chance to ask questions are very special.

R.A. Miller Flickr Gallery and GMOA in the News

Peter Loose just sent us 20-odd images of his R.A. Millers to add to the online gallery we've been compiling. Please, if you have an R.A., send us a picture of it. His work is so widespread, across the state and the country, and he was so prolific than a full catalogue of it is impossible, so we're trying to do the best we can to show a representative range of his images online.

We also got a nice post and link about the Lord Love You exhibition here, from Detour Art Travels blog. We're sad they missed the opening reception, but we hope they come back and see the show, which is up until Oct. 24.

A Week of Folk Art

Barbara Hutsell Stutz sent us images of her R.A.'s to add to our Flickr set over the weekend, and we marked a few others as favorites on Flickr.

If you're into folk art, you really should go check out Folk Fest, which is the world's largest folk art show and sale, featuring 100 galleries and dealers from around the United States, and runs Friday through Sunday in Norcross. Admission is $15 on Friday, but if you mention GMOA, you get a free T-shirt.

Our opening reception for Lord Love You is Saturday, from 6 to 8 p.m., at the Lyndon House Arts Center, and is free. Come hang out, eat some bbq, see the exhibition and check out the shop, which will be carrying several of the museum's catalogues (including Amazing Grace and Lord Love You) as well as the limited-edition poster for the exhibition. We'll remind you again, but go ahead and mark it all in your day-planner.

Lord Love You press kit sticker

Press kits for Lord Love You: Works by R.A. Miller from the Mullis Collection, which opens August 8 at the Lyndon House Arts Center (click here to go to the press room on our website, which has the press release and images for the media), have been going out, adorned with this adorable sticker that should give some hint of what the exhibition catalogue will look like.

Remember that we are inviting the public to submit images of their own R.A. Millers to gmoapr@yahoo.com along with any stories they might have about the paintings. Once we have some submissions, we'll post a Flickr photo gallery that we'll keep adding to as long as the exhibition remains up.

Art Film

Thanks to the New York Times, we learned about Make, a documentary about four artists with varying degrees of mental or physical disabilities: Judith Scott, Hawkins Bolden, Royal Robertson (one of whose works appeared in our exhibition Amazing Grace: Self-Taught Artists from the Mullis Collection) and Ike Morgan. Currently, the film is screening at Ricco/Maresca Gallery in New York, but you can watch the trailer at its official website and scroll through a photo gallery. The thing about artists like this is that, perhaps due to their lack of self-promotion, it's all too easy to discover them only after their deaths, when important stories can no longer be accurately documented. The film appears to be the kind of useful primary research that will serve us in good stead.

Ulysses Davis and Bruce Metcalf

These aren't usually two artists you would see mentioned together. Ulysses Davis was a Georgia folk artist known for his wood carvings who passed away in 1990, while Bruce Metcalf is a contemporary studio jeweler who has been very influential in his field. But they have at least two things in common: Both are the subject of solo exhibitions this year, and both have been featured in exhibitions and publications organized and produced by the Georgia Museum of Art.

Ulysses Davis is the subject of a major exhibition opening today at the American Folk Art Museum, The Treasure of Ulysses Davis, which features 100 of his wood sculptures. One of his reliefs, pictured below, appeared in the exhibition and publication Amazing Grace: Self-Taught Artists from the Mullis Collection in September of 2007 at GMOA.


Bruce Metcalf, on the other hand, is the subject of an exhibition opening June 27 at the Bellevue Arts Museum, The Miniature Worlds of Bruce Metcalf, and had a ring included in The Ring Shows: Then & Now and Putting the Band Back Together in August of 2008.


Are we bragging? A little bit, but we're always interested in following artists who have had their work in exhibitions at the museum, especially because we learn so much about them in the process of organizing an exhibition, writing wall text, working on a catalogue, publicizing it all and more that it makes us want to keep on learning. It's kind of like learning a new word and then seeing it everywhere.

Edit: The New York Times has added a Davis slideshow.

Interview today

Today, Paul Manoguerra, our curator of American art, is going to interview Carl Mullis, folk art collector, and Durwood Pepper, one of R.A. Miller's first dealers and a folk artist himself, about R.A. Miller in preparation for the book to accompany Lord Love You: Works by R.A. Miller from the Mullis Collection, the exhibition we're organizing that will be on view at the Lyndon House Arts Center in early August of this year. We're attempting to record the interview not only for Paul's reference, but also to be able to post it on our website as a podcast. We still have some older podcasts archived on our site here, and it's definitely something we'd like to get back into. Do you listen to museum podcasts? What kinds of things would you be interested in us recording and posting?