Emery Blagdon, The Healing Machine, Garfield Table, NE

Emery Blagdon, "The Healing Machine" (site view, interior, n.d.), Garfield Table, NE, c. 1955–1986. Photo: Seymour Rosen. © SPACES—Saving and Preserving Arts and Cultural Environments.

Exterior view of "The Healing Machine" shed and adjoining workshop (site view, n.d.), Garfield Table, NE. Photo: Seymour Rosen. © SPACES—Saving and Preserving Arts and Cultural Environments.

Emery Blagdon's house (site view, n.d.), Garfield Table, NE. Photo: Seymour Rosen. © SPACES—Saving and Preserving Arts and Cultural Environments.

The Site

After inheriting a piece of property in Garfield Table, Nebraska, Emery Blagon sought to understand the healing properties of Earth’s natural forces. Inspired by the experience of watching his parents suffer with terminal cancer, he sought to create a space that could channel the curative properties of minerals, magnetic fields, and electrical currents. This endeavor would occupy the artist for the next thirty years. The conglomeration of kinetic assemblages in a shed behind his house grew to incorporate pieces of sheet metal, tinfoil, magnets, masking tape, plastic beads, Christmas lights, and mechanical odds and ends, along with wrapped bundles and glass jars of chemical elements and minerals he acquired from a pharmacist he befriended in North Platte named Dan Dryden.

The “pretties” contained in his shed featured symmetric and repetitive forms strung into constructions several feet in length. These were anchored by a series of paintings Blagdon installed stacked or facing down to the earth; they employ concentric circles or squares and often radiate from a center point. After his death in 1986, the “machine” was purchased by Dan Dryden. Dryden spent decades caring for the work, and Kohler Foundation, Inc., purchased it in 2004.

It was gifted to the Arts Center in 2007.

Emery Blagdon

1907–1986

Emery Blagdon was born in 1907 in the tiny town of Callaway, in the Sand Hills of west-central Nebraska. The oldest of six children, he was raised on farmland homesteaded by his maternal grandfather. Solitary by nature and uninterested in farming, Blagdon embarked on several years of itinerancy, riding the rails and working seasonally as a laborer. After returning home in the mid-1930s, he met his minimal needs by doing mechanical odd jobs.

In 1955 Blagdon inherited an uncle’s house in Garfield Table, forty miles west of Callaway, and he started to fill a large shed on the property with intricate mobile sculptures made primarily of bent baling wire, along with highly geometric, vividly colored paintings on salvaged wood.

After Blagdon’s death from cancer in 1986, a local advocate named Dan Dryden and his friend Don Christensen saved the environment from destruction by acquiring the barn and all its contents at a rural auction. Dryden titled the environment “The Healing Machine” because Blagdon referred to his project as “a machine” with “healing” properties. In 2004 Kohler Foundation, Inc., purchased more than four hundred of these components, and after three years of cleaning and conservation gifted “The Healing Machine” to the John Michael Kohler Arts Center.