CAVIN-MORRIS GALLERY

SANDHILL HEALINGS: IMPORTANT WORK BY EMERY BLAGDON

NOVEMBER 29, 2007 - JANUARY 12, 2008

On a brown plateau in the Sandhills of Nebraska from the 1950’s through the early 80’s occurred an amazing phenomenon. There, amidst the found music of cicadas and rushing wind stood an innocuous shed. Inside this shed there was nothing innocuous. It was filled with the visionary flash and filigree of a man named Emery Blagdon who wanted to heal the body-weary and unhealthy people of the world with machines he had invented to channel the powerful electromagnetic energy of the earth.

The great majority of that intense shed, densely packed with hundreds of pieces are now in the collection of the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin and currently on display in their major exhibition on environments called Sublime Spaces and Visionary Worlds.

There were some pieces that were not acquired by the Kohler. Cavin-Morris Gallery introduced some of these pieces several years ago.  In a feature article in the New York Times Edward Gomez said: “For all their tumbleweed wildness, Blagdon’s constructions are often elegantly assembled. His paintings, with their bold, simple palettes and dynamic patterns, recall early modernist geometric abstractions.”  Now the remainder of these available works will be presented in our exhibition entitled: Healing From the Sandhills: Important Works by Emery Blagdon. Curated by Don Christensen and Dan Dryden; artists themselves and longtime preservers and promoters of Emery Blagdon’s epic work, this exhibition of approximately forty paintings and sculptures will provide a rare opportunity to see the intricacy of Blagdon’s process by focusing on individual works.