Emery Blagdon Education Resources

Starting in the 1960s, Emery Blagdon worked for more than twenty-five years on sculptures and paintings in a shed near his home in Nebraska. He believed that his mobiles, paintings, and sculptures had powers to cure people. He used different art materials and found objects to create his work such as masking tape, sheet metal, aluminum foil, minerals, lights, and mechanical odds and ends.

After he died, Dan Dryden, a pharmacist who became friends with Blagdon and Dryden’s friend Don Christiansen saved Blagdon’s work when it was being sold at an auction. They wanted to make sure that Blagdon’s creation was preserved so that other people could experience and look at his work. Dan Dryden referred to Blagdon’s work as “The Healing Machine.” After “The Healing Machine” traveled around the United States, and even to France in 1997, Kohler Foundation, Inc., purchased the entire collection of more than four hundred individual works in 2004. It took three years to clean and conserve all of the pieces of “The Healing Machine.” The entire collection was gifted to the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in June 2007. “The Healing Machine” is on view at the Art Preserve.