Feature image: Guadalupe Maravilla, Mariposa Relámpago, 2023; bus, volcanic rock, steel, and objects collected from a ritual of retracing the artist’s original migration route; 182 x 500 x 180 in. Courtesy of Guadalupe Maravilla and P·P·O·W, New York. © Guadalupe Maravilla. Photo: Mel Taing.
Submitted
Sheboygan, WI — Opening May 30, 2026, at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center (JMKAC), Guadalupe Maravilla with Emery Blagdon: The star exploding in the body brings together for the first time the work of two artists who have dedicated their lives, through their multi-sensory artistic practices, to healing. On view through December 6, the exhibition showcases Blagdon and Maravilla’s exploratory and multisensory approaches to healing through the creation of “healing machines” in response to their own lives being touched by cancer.
“The star exploding in the body turns the gallery into a site of activation rather than observation,” explains Laura Bickford, Associate Curator at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, “through sound, vibration, and the interspersed energies of Maravilla’s ‘Disease Throwers’ and Blagdon’s Healing Machine, visitors are invited to experience how these artists envision their works not simply as objects to be viewed, but as forces to be used in the pursuit of restoration and care.”
After many members of his family were afflicted with cancer, Emery Blagdon, who lived on his family’s homestead in Garfield Table, Nebraska, became convinced of the healing potential of unseen forces within the Earth. Beginning in the 1960s, he worked for more than 25 years in a shed near his home constructing “The Healing Machine,” an immersive environment of mobiles, paintings, and sculptures made from masking tape, tin foil, sheet metal, wire, lights, minerals, Christmas decorations, and other found materials, which he believed could cure illness by harnessing magnetism, electricity, and other energies. In 2007, years after Blagdon’s death, the John Michael Kohler Arts Center was gifted the complete collection of over 400 works making up the art environment, where it is preserved and presented in a structure evoking Blagdon’s original shed, as a cornerstone of JMKAC’s Art Preserve collection.
Working decades later, Guadalupe Maravilla similarly turns to art as a site for healing grounded in lived experience. Maravilla migrated to the United States from El Salvador unaccompanied at age eight and, at 36, was diagnosed with stage 3 colon cancer. During treatment, he connected with Indigenous healing practices, including sound baths, which are ceremonies that harness sonic vibrations from gongs, conch shells, and other instruments to restore balance and calm. Blurring art, science, and medicine, Maravilla began creating sculptures he calls “Disease Throwers” or “healing machines,” incorporating found objects tied to his migration history alongside gongs and bowls that he activates through sound ceremonies.
About the Exhibition
The star exploding in the body highlights the resonance between the two artists’ practices, using Maravilla’s artistic interventions to activate and invite new engagement around Blagdon’s art environment. Standing as the centerpiece of the exhibition, Maravilla’s Mariposa Relámpago, originally commissioned in 2023 by the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, is a reclaimed bus transformed into a vehicle for healing, and will be once again transformed by Maravilla for the exhibition, who will reimagine it as a temple, exhibiting it for the first time at JMKAC. Maravilla will activate portions of Emery Blagdon’s “The Healing Machine,” relocated from the Art Preserve to JMKAC’s main galleries for the first time, using various instruments, such as gongs and tuning forks, and their vibrations to “play” the pieces, transforming the gallery into an immersive space for healing.
Throughout the exhibition’s run, Maravilla will facilitate sound ceremonies for members of the public, both in May and the fall, with select ceremonies offered exclusively to those living with cancer. Additional programming will be announced at a later date.
“This exhibition showcases important work from the Arts Center’s permanent collection in new light through collaboration with a contemporary artist,” says Amy Horst, Executive Director of the John Michael Kohler Arts Center. “Additionally, with programming that amplifies participation and shared experience for anyone in need of healing and comfort, the exhibition embodies the Center’s mission of creating an accessible space for art, connection, and exchange, extending beyond the gallery.”
During the exhibition, two of Maravilla’s “Disease Throwers” will be installed at the Art Preserve within the shed structure built to house “The Healing Machine,” alongside paintings by Blagdon, to anchor the space while the art environment is on view in the main galleries.
About Guadalupe Maravilla
Guadalupe Maravilla is a transdisciplinary visual artist, choreographer, and healer. At the age of eight, Maravilla was part of the first wave of unaccompanied children to arrive at the United States border in the 1980s as a result of the Salvadoran Civil War. As an acknowledgement of his own migratory past, Maravilla grounds his practice in the historical and contemporary contexts of immigrant culture, particularly those belonging to Latinx communities.
Maravilla currently lives in New York, New York. His work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain; Tate, London, UK; Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; and National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, among others. He has presented solo exhibitions at P·P·O·W, New York, NY; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, CO; Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Oslo, Norway; Socrates Sculpture Park, New York, NY; REDCAT, Los Angeles, CA; and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL, among others.
About Emery Blagdon
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, 40 miles west of Callaway. There, he sought to understand the healing properties of Earth’s natural forces. Inspired by the experience of watching his family members 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 30 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 it was gifted to the Arts Center in 2007.
About the John Michael Kohler Arts Center
Founded in 1967, the John Michael Kohler Arts Center (JMKAC) is a nonprofit creative hub that supports the work of contemporary artists through original exhibitions, commissions, residencies, publications, and community programming across visual and performing arts. The only institution in the world that collects artist- built and artist home-based environments, JMKAC is a leading center for the research, preservation, and presentation of artists with wide-ranging practices and backgrounds from academically trained to self-taught and folk traditions, championing long-term relationships with artists and elevating work that has often been overlooked or under-recognized. JMKAC is a vital cultural resource that responds to the needs of its local and regional communities, preserving artistic heritage by uplifting contemporary voices and empowering future generations.
Hours
Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday: 10:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m.
Thursday: 10:00 a.m.–8:00 p.m.
Saturday, Sunday: 10:00 a.m.–4:00 p.m.
Locations
John Michael Kohler Arts Center: 608 New York Avenue, Sheboygan, WI
Contact
Emily Shedal, Communications Specialist, JMKAC
EShedal@jmkac.org