About the artist
1907–1986, Garfield Table, Nebraska
Emery Blagdon constructed the enigmatic environment that is his legacy in a small ramshackle shed on his farm about twenty miles northeast of North Platte, Nebraska, in the desolate Sandhills country. Not much is known about the man himself: he was born to a Lincoln County farming family in 1907, attended school through the eighth grade, and spent much of the Depression years on the road and riding the rails. In the early 1950s, he inherited his uncle’s 160-acre farm and returned to Nebraska where he worked the land minimally as a subsistence farmer. Around 1955, at age forty-eight, Blagdon embarked on the project that would occupy and sustain him for the next three decades of his life, the construction of a dense network of “Healing Machines.” As a young man, he apparently lost his parents and three of his five younger siblings to cancer, and he designed his shed––which housed a system of elegant, spindly mobiles and delicate freestanding sculptures made out of baling wire and found objects––to produce energy fields with preventative, restorative, and curative powers. The objects’ reflective, kinetic, and color properties were intended to resonate and release an electromagnetic force to combat physical and psychic pain. Blagdon’s cure also relied on an equally remarkable, but smaller, group of abstract geometrical panel paintings, which display a transcendental sense of color, proportion, and pattern. Blagdon considered himself more a healer or scientist-inventor than an artist, although he welcomed visitors to view his shed and bask in its regenerative effect. Although a bit of a recluse, his easy manner and willingness to share his work led local pharmacist Dan Dryden on a pilgrimage to view the installation after Blagdon approached him at the pharmacy in search of “earth elements” for his Machines. After the artist’s death––of cancer––in 1986, Dryden and a friend purchased the shed in its entirety at auction and have since campaigned to restore and exhibit the environment in its original form (with certain smaller pieces for sale commercially). Blagdon’s integral “Healing Machines” environment has been exhibited at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Fourth Biennale in Lyon, France; after conservation, the environment was acquired by the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, for its permanent collection.
—Brendan Greaves
Above: Emery Blagdon inside his Healing Machine (interior site detail, Garfield Table, Nebraska), c. 1955-86. Photo: (c) Sally and Richard Greenhill; courtesy of John Michael Kohler Arts Center.
Bibliography
Brackman, Barbara, and Cathy Dwigans, eds. Backyard Visionaries: Grassroots Art in the Midwest. Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 1999.
Dryden, Don and Don Christensen. “Grassroots Artist: Emery Blagdon.” KGAA News 8, no. 2 (1988): 1-2.
Emery Blagdon: The Healing Machines. Chicago: Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art, 1992.
“The Healing Machines of Emery Blagdon.” Intuit 1, Issue 1 (Fall 1992): 1, 4.
Johnson, Ken, "Flights of Fancy: Artist as Medicine Man." New York Times, Jan. 10, 2008.
Self-Taught Artists of the 20th Century: An American Anthology. New York: Museum of American Folk Art, in association with Chronicle Books, San Francisco, 1998.
Umberger, Leslie. Sublime Spaces and Visionary Worlds: Built Environments of Vernacular Artists. Sheboygan, WI: John Michael Kohler Arts Center, in association with Princeton Architectural Press, 2007.
Umberger, Leslie. “Earthly Power: Emery Blagdon.” Raw Vision 59 (Summer 2007).