Buena Vista, GA – On Saturday, November 1st, Artists and musicians of all varieties well gather At Pasaquan, near Buena Vista, Georgia, to pay tribute to the artistic legacy of Eddie Owens Martin, who created the globally famous visionary art environment. The artists will gather for a day to show their support for the preservation of Martin’s acclaimed environmental art masterpiece at an event called Artists for Pasaquan. The assembled artists and musicians, who will come from all around the South, will display their recent work and play music for the visiting public.

Included among the many artists and musicians who will appear at Pasaquan are:

Butch Anthony, a young eccentric artist from Seale, Alabama, who makes sculptures from found objects, paints pictures, and creates unique exhibits all based on his own style of artistic expression – intertwangelism;

Ned Berry, a prolific traditional Georgia potter who makes utilitarian as well as eccentric forms in high-fired stoneware. Berry grew up in Columbus, Georgia, and now lives in Harris County;

Rick Edwards, a singer/songwriter from Columbus, Georgia. Edwards is the founder of the Chattahoochee Folk music Society. As a youth, he befriended Jimmie Tarlton, the American music legend who wrote Columbus Stockade Blues and Birmingham Jail. At the time, Tarlton was an elderly man living in public housing in Phenix City, Alabama, and Rick Edwards was an aspiring  guitarist still in high school;

Jake Fussell, who is a student in the Southern Studies program at the University of Mississippi, will play old-time Southern folk and blues music. During the past year Fussell has performed with Mississippi-based blues bands at the House of Blues in New Orleans, at various blues festivals in Finland, Switzerland, Italy, and at music venues all around the Southeast. He appeared solo last year on the Prairie Home Companion radio program and was recently a featured performer at the Georgia Music Hall of Fame in Macon;

Christen Holloway is a senior art major at ColumbusState University. Holloway is a devoted volunteer at Pasaquan who has spent months learning St. EOM’s eccentric dance moves from vintage documentary film of the artist. She will perform dance, Eddie Martin-style, on the Pasaquan dance circle at the event;

Bond & Meg Anderson live at Parrott, GA. Meg is an artist who is a member of the well-known artistic Tilley family from Parrott. Bond Anderson creates huge percussion musical instruments that he installs for use out-of-doors at schools and park playgrounds worldwide.

Approximately three-dozen additional artists and musicians are expected to participate at Pasaquan on November 1st. Visitors are welcome to bring their own picnic lunches, although a variety of food will be available for purchase at the event.

Artists for Pasaquan is timed to coincide with this year’s Rural America Festival in Buena Vista. The Rural America Festival is a celebration of life and culture as it is lived in rural America. The annual event, which features a parade, music, crafts, children’s activities, food, and fun, is staged every year in Buena Vista on the first Saturday in November.

Saturday, November 1, will be the final opening day at Pasaquan during the 2008 season. The site will not be open again for public tours until the first Saturday in April, 2009. Admission to Pasaquan is $5.00 per person. Children under six are admitted free.

For more information on Pasaquan or for directions on how to find it, go to http://www.pasaquan.com.

Contact:            Fred C. Fussell

                        (229) 649-6957

                        fcfussell@gmail.com

 

 

"I built this place to have somethin' to identify with, cause there's nothin' that I see in this society that I identify with or desire to emulate.

Here I can be in my own world with my temples and designs and the spirit of God. I don't have nothin' against other people and their beliefs.  I'm not askin' anybody to do my way or be my way.

Although, when I'm dead and gone, they'll follow like night follows day."

St. EOM to his biographer, Tom Patterson, 1985

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.

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