The Healing Machines of Emery Blagdon
(from a Chicago ‘art brut’ museum newsletter)
- “As far as I’m concerned, ther ain’t no outsiders of anything. If you’re an artist, you’re an artist. If you’re a mechanic, you’re a mechanic. If you’re a farmer, you’re a farmer. Ain’t no outsider farmers, ain’t no outsider mechanics. That’s just something that someone’s got up to class things. I ignore it.”
- –Rev. Howard Finster, artist
Born in l907, Emery Blagdon was a native of central Nebraska. The oldest of six children, he attended a country school until about the eighth grade and worked on the family farm. When he turned 18, Blagdon left the farm and became a hobo, exploring and traveling the western United States. About ten years later, his bachelor uncle died, leaving Blagdon an estate of 160 acres of farmland, near Stapleton, Nebraska.
Shortly afterwards, Blagdon quit farming, leased his land to another farmer, and, for the rest of his life, lived very simply off the rental income. At 48, having no previous artistic inclination, but concerned about an illness that had taken the lives of his parents and two of his siblings, Blagdon began painting and working on his “healing machines.”
Over a 30-year period, Blagdon created more than 600 sculptures and 100 paintings, which together comprised a giant phantasmagoric “machine.” He believed the machines could prevent disease or could cure people who had already become ill. The entire installation, strung with blinking Christmas-tree lights, was carefully and artistically displayed in his 800-square-foot shed.
In 1975 Blagdon encountered Dan Dryden, a local pharmacist, whom he met while purchasing “earth elements.” When Dryder inquired why he wanted the elements, Blagdon replied, “I’m building some machines and I need these elements for my machines.” “What kind of machines?” Dryden asked, to which Blagdon replied, “They’re healing machines and they have energy fields around them.” After Dryden filled and labeled several vials of different compounds, Blagdon invited him to his farm to see the machines.
Two weeks later, Dryden drove to the Sandhills farm. This visit would forever change his life. Later, recounting his personal encounter, Dryden wrote:
“The farmyard looked abandoned. The house hadn’t been painted for many years. The front was overgrown with shrubs and weeds. The old rickety screen door in the back was half open into a small pantry and a kitchen. It looked abandoned there, too. Emery appeared like an apparition, smiling in the doorway.”
He took Dryden to a shed behind the house, where he unlocked a padlock. Stepping into a small room with a dirt floor, lit only by a few bare light bulbs, Dryden noticed a “forest of hanging wire, bent into various shapes and hooked together along with an indecipherable frenzy of other objects and tools. A seemingly endless array of bent wire, metal scraps, tin foil and tin cans.”
Blagdon then unlocked another padlock from an inner door which led to a larger, but windowless room. He flipped on several switches. Dryden writes, “The scene was overwhelming. Strings of Christmas tree lights popped on along with lights on the floor and around the room. The lights danced on thousands of bits of foil and wire and ribbon. There was no sense of distinct pieces.”
Blagdon explained how the machines worked. “A few people come here to be cured. The energy fields from my with their arthritis. They just stand around here and then they feel better.”
Dryden moved away from North Platte shortly after his visit. For years he would relate the story of his visit to friends. Eleven years later, Dryden and a childhood friend, decided to drive to Nebraska to look up Blagdon.
When he was unable to find Blagdon, he visited a nephew, where he learned that Blagdon had died of cancer on June 4, 1986. Leaving no will, Blagdon’s possessions were in probate. Everything, including the healing machines, was up for public auction.
It was then and there that the two men decided to purchase the complete installation. With the help of an army of friends, the installation was mapped, numbered, cataloged, photographed, and moved to secure and preserve it from deterioration. Work like Blagdon’s is rarely saved.
