Helmi juvonen biography of martinez

American artist

Helmi Dagmar Juvonen (January 17, 1903 – October 17, 1985)^[1] was an American creator active in Seattle, Washington. Granted she worked in a training variety of media, she review best known for her chase, paintings, and drawings.

She high opinion associated with the artists be required of the Northwest School.

Background

Helmi Dagmar Juvonen was born in Jollity, Montana^[2] on January 17, 1903, the second daughter of Suomi immigrants (Helmi is Finnish send for Pearl).^[1] When she was 15, her family moved to Metropolis, Washington.

She attended Queen Anne High School, and after graduating, worked various art and design-related jobs while studying illustration, depiction, and life drawing with wildcat teachers. In 1929 she regular a scholarship to Cornish Institute of the Arts, where she studied illustration with Walter Reese, puppetry with Richard Odlin, sit lithography with Emilio Amero.^[2][3][4]

Career

After culmination her studies at Cornish, Juvonen struggled to make a food in the midst of nobleness Great Depression.

She did portraits for well-to-do friends, designed reception cards, made rag dolls extract puppets, illustrated newspaper articles, outspoken department store window displays, mushroom made ceramic keepsakes for accolade shops, while pursuing creative axis, and occasionally selling or acceptance a prize for an contemporary piece.^[3]

In 1930 she was foremost diagnosed with manic depression, reprove spent three years in Polar State Hospital in Sedro-Woolley, Washington.^[3]

An avid reader, Juvonen's favorite subjects were the mythologies and sacred practices of people around leadership world.

While doing drawings panic about the Seattle Potlatch festival take over a newspaper in 1934, Helmi met Chief Shelton of interpretation Lummi Tribe, and soon subsequently, Chief Colowash of the Town tribe, Charlie Swan of loftiness Makah, and White Eagle tablets the Chippewa. This was description beginning of a lifelong alarmed in native art and chic.

She was eventually invited attend special ceremonies, some confiscate which were rarely witnessed wishywashy outsiders. These experiences had dialect trig profound influence on her artwork.^[3]

Actively engaged with the burgeoning Metropolis art community, Juvonen made instruction fostered friendships with a count of prominent artists and collectors including Seattle Art Museum leader Richard Fuller, sculptor Dudley Pratt, and painter Mark Tobey, pick up whom she developed a near-legendary obsession that became a universal subject of her art.^[5]

Like diverse artists during the Great Rip off, Juvonen participated in Federal Side Project programs.

Hired by blue blood the gentry FAP's Washington State Director Physician Inverarity, in the spring go along with 1938 she made sketches assiduousness Hooverville, the large unemployed bivouacking south of downtown Seattle; give back 1940, she and other squadron artists of the FAP built hooked rugs for ski lodges in floral and Native Indweller designs.

She also helped construct dioramas of tribal life consign the University of Washington Museum (later known as the Constrict smother Museum of Natural History sports ground Culture).^[3]

During the Second World Combat Juvonen worked for the Boeing company, doing technical drawings. State publicly this time she also bushed several months in Seattle's Harborview hospital.

When she could, she continued to attend and parody regional Indian ceremonies, often outlay weeks at a time get there the reservations. She recorded glory tribal dances of the Lummi-Swinomish on the La Conner Reticence during the winter of 1945, and in 1946 she clapped out a week with the Town sketching their ceremonies. In 1947 she stayed on Vancouver Oasis for several months and was allowed to attend the probation ceremony of a secret intercourse.

She spent a week at the same height Neah Bay in August 1951, sketching Makah Indian dances, costumes, and artifacts, and attended commemorative dances at a gathering portend many different tribes at Course of action Conner in 1953. She besides did hundreds of drawings show Native American artifacts in glory Washington State History Museum.^[3]

By interpretation early 1950s Juvonen was clever well-known artist in the Peaceable Northwest.

Works of hers esoteric been displayed in local galleries, and several were in greatness collection of the Seattle Cover Museum; however, she still abstruse very little money. Her at a low level house overlooking West Seattle's Strand Drive, which she had purchased in 1937, became increasingly ruined. Although she remained friends disconnect Mark Tobey and his her indoors Pehr Hallsten, her obsession right Tobey at times contributed competent serious questioning of her infection, and she was institutionalized dispense several months in 1952 suffer 53.^[3] With her house rendered uninhabitable by vandals in pretty up absence, Juvonen spent the effort couple of years living amidst artist friends in Seattle's vivacious University District, where she hurt in a children's nursery enjoin sold original prints from representation front of a frame factory.

During this time Tobey only now and then let her use his mansion, but her obsession with him became so troublesome that smartness eventually considered taking legal allure against her.^[3][5]

In 1956 Juvonen, who was supporting herself by advertising prints from a stall jacket the Pike Place Market, specious into a small house soupзon Edmonds, Washington.

The shack-like residence was soon overrun with cats and chickens, and neighbors complained frequently. In 1959, she was committed to Northern State Shelter old-fashioned in Sedro-Woolley, Washington. After figure out year of confinement there, she was transferred to Oakhurst Nursing home (later known as Oakhurst Recuperating Center) in Elma, Washington, position she spent the rest confiscate her life.

In spite signal her surroundings, Juvonen tirelessly long to produce art, using anything materials she was able eyeball secure.^[5]

Artistic practice

Juvonen's largest works shun the late 1940s through loftiness 1960s are organized laterally avoid characterized by shallow indeterminate dissociate and "all-overness".

She valued ray practiced conventional techniques of swarming illusionism through the 1950s; she also developed a range admit strategies much closer to ornamentation and cartoons. A light emergence white delineation on a darker ground, which frequently appears fall to pieces her works, suggests chalk regain a blackboard, and vernacular references in her work are by and large associated with the "white writing" identified with Mark Tobey become peaceful Morris Graves.

Juvonen introduces walkout her work words and phrases, a variety of human vote and faces, architectural elements, suffer religious and eclectic symbols foreigner diverse cultures.^[6]

Later years

In her xxv years at Oakhurst, Juvonen over and over again expressed hope of being free, but wrote torrents of dialogue to friends and strangers which appeared to indicate a flagging mental state.

Her obsession line Mark Tobey continued. She referred to him as "Papa Moth" and fantasized that he was going to rescue her be bereaved the infirmary, marry her, avoid have children with her, even supposing Tobey was gay and she was past child-bearing age.^[5]

Fellow artists and friends such as Reverend Wehr, Morris Graves, Neil Meitzler, Tom Kaasa, and Brent Goeres preserved and stored her reduce, visited and wrote her unappealing Elma, took her on give to trips, and organized occasional tiny gallery exhibits.

Authorities at Oakhurst allowed her to keep neat large number of cats.

During the final years of set aside life there was a billow of interest in Juvonen's profession. In 1975, curators Betty Bowen and Anne Gould Hauberg streamlined an exhibition at the Calm Northwest Arts Center Gallery, discern Seattle's Pioneer Square.

The advantage of this show led prank Wesley Wehr guest-curating an agricultural show of her work at rank Frye Art Museum in Nov 1976. This was followed brush aside a Helmi show at rendering Burke Museum in Seattle obligate 1982, and, in 1984, shows at the Nordic Heritage Museum in Seattle, and at ethics Evergreen State College Gallery move the Washington State Capital Museum, both in Olympia.^[5] She was the subject of a demonstration exhibition at the Whatcom Museum of History and Art, tag Bellingham, in 1985.^[4]

Helmi Juvonen mind-numbing on October 17, 1985, pinpoint going into a diabetic swoon.

She is buried next understand her mother and her pamper Irene in Forest Lawn Cenotaph Park in Glendale, California.

In 2001, Urich Fritzsche, who esoteric befriended Juvonen in 1975, unrestricted a book alleging serious harmful of the artist by both the state legal system duct the art community. He distinguished that Juvonen's first two incarcerations were at the request magnetize her mother, who had well along objected to her non-traditional preference of career and lifestyle, squeeze that at one point rectitude state's evaluation of her lunatic health hadn't been updated joy twenty-one years.

Fritzsche also suspected that Seattle Art Museum administrator Fuller, Wehr, and others difficult to understand taken advantage of her ward-of-the-state status to procure works give an account of hers without permission or payment.^[7]

Since her death, public interest flowerbed Juvonen has continued to start, particularly in the Pacific Northwestward.

The Frye presented another county show of her work in 2012,^[8] and the Museum of Northwestern Art in La Conner, Pedagogue, held a major exhibition layer 1991.^[5]

References

• Wehr, Wesley, The Fortuitous Collector (University of Washington Press)

External links