Emery Blagdon

Bio

Emery Blagdon (1907 - 1986) was born in the tiny town of Callaway, in the Sand Hills of west-central Nebraska. He was raised on farmland homesteaded by his grandfather. Solitary by nature and uninterested in farming, Blagdon embarked on several years of itinerancy, riding trains 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 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.

In 1989, a 60-piece exhibit toured cities in the Midwest and South. In 1997, a reproduction of Blagdon’s shed was created in Lyon, France (less than fifty miles from Ferdinand Cheval’s Palais Ideal) with 380 works displayed for the Fourth Biennale de Lyon, later traveling to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. And in 2004, the Kohler Foundation purchased the entire collection. After three years cleaning and conserving its components, it was gifted to the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin in June, 2007.