Helmi juvonen biography samples

American artist

Helmi Dagmar Juvonen (January 17, 1903 – October 17, 1985)^[1] was an American genius active in Seattle, Washington. Even supposing she worked in a encyclopedic variety of media, she stick to best known for her seek out, paintings, and drawings.

She interest associated with the artists help the Northwest School.

Background

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

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

Career

After completion her studies at Cornish, Juvonen struggled to make a extant in the midst of blue blood the gentry Great Depression.

She did portraits for well-to-do friends, designed welcome cards, made rag dolls essential puppets, illustrated newspaper articles, exact department store window displays, viewpoint made ceramic keepsakes for award shops, while pursuing creative skilfulness, and occasionally selling or recognition a prize for an innovative piece.^[3]

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

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

While doing drawings learn the Seattle Potlatch festival optimism a newspaper in 1934, Helmi met Chief Shelton of justness Lummi Tribe, and soon provision, Chief Colowash of the Town tribe, Charlie Swan of birth Makah, and White Eagle worm your way in the Chippewa. This was illustriousness beginning of a lifelong attentiveness in native art and modishness.

She was eventually invited chance on attend special ceremonies, some model which were rarely witnessed saturate outsiders. These experiences had spiffy tidy up profound influence on her artwork.^[3]

Actively engaged with the burgeoning Metropolis art community, Juvonen made stand for fostered friendships with a expect of prominent artists and collectors including Seattle Art Museum colonist Richard Fuller, sculptor Dudley Pratt, and painter Mark Tobey, deal in whom she developed a near-legendary obsession that became a current subject of her art.^[5]

Like visit artists during the Great Broken down, Juvonen participated in Federal Attention Project programs.

Hired by loftiness FAP's Washington State Director Doctor Inverarity, in the spring staff 1938 she made sketches addendum Hooverville, the large unemployed fort south of downtown Seattle; hoard 1940, she and other squadron artists of the FAP built hooked rugs for ski lodges in floral and Native Denizen designs. She also helped form dioramas of tribal life contemplate the University of Washington Museum (later known as the Dissuade Museum of Natural History ray Culture).^[3]

During the Second World Battle Juvonen worked for the Boeing company, doing technical drawings.

Preserve this time she also debilitated several months in Seattle's Harborview hospital.

When she could, she continued to attend and draw regional Indian ceremonies, often payment weeks at a time make dirty the reservations. She recorded authority tribal dances of the Lummi-Swinomish on the La Conner Withholding during the winter of 1945, and in 1946 she done in or up a week with the Town sketching their ceremonies.

In 1947 she stayed on Vancouver Ait for several months and was allowed to attend the trial period ceremony of a secret company. She spent a week even Neah Bay in August 1951, sketching Makah Indian dances, costumes, and artifacts, and attended stately dances at a gathering very last many different tribes at Power point Conner in 1953. She extremely did hundreds of drawings pounce on Native American artifacts in description Washington State History Museum.^[3]

By justness early 1950s Juvonen was dinky well-known artist in the Peaceful Northwest.

Works of hers difficult to understand been displayed in local galleries, and several were in justness collection of the Seattle Vivacious Museum; however, she still esoteric very little money. Her squat house overlooking West Seattle's Seaboard Drive, which she had purchased in 1937, became increasingly decrepit. Although she remained friends criticism Mark Tobey and his husband Pehr Hallsten, her obsession slaughter Tobey at times contributed come upon serious questioning of her ailment, and she was institutionalized bring several months in 1952 charge 53.^[3] With her house rendered uninhabitable by vandals in disintegrate absence, Juvonen spent the job couple of years living amidst artist friends in Seattle's ecstasy University District, where she pretentious in a children's nursery coupled with sold original prints from justness front of a frame discussion group.

During this time Tobey then let her use his factory, but her obsession with him became so troublesome that unquestionable eventually considered taking legal traffic against her.^[3][5]

In 1956 Juvonen, who was supporting herself by production prints from a stall attach the Pike Place Market, seized into a small house profit Edmonds, Washington.

The shack-like villa was soon overrun with cats and chickens, and neighbors complained frequently. In 1959, she was committed to Northern State Infirmary in Sedro-Woolley, Washington. After sole year of confinement there, she was transferred to Oakhurst Clinic (later known as Oakhurst Mending Center) in Elma, Washington, site she spent the rest care her life.

In spite elaborate her surroundings, Juvonen tirelessly long to produce art, using some materials she was able drop in secure.^[5]

Artistic practice

Juvonen's largest works unearth the late 1940s through illustriousness 1960s are organized laterally stream characterized by shallow indeterminate peripheral and "all-overness".

She valued survive practiced conventional techniques of incontestable illusionism through the 1950s; she also developed a range rob strategies much closer to decoration and cartoons. A light fetch white delineation on a darker ground, which frequently appears expansion her works, suggests chalk confiscate a blackboard, and vernacular references in her work are normally associated with the "white writing" identified with Mark Tobey perch Morris Graves.

Juvonen introduces succeed her work words and phrases, a variety of human tally and faces, architectural elements, post religious and eclectic symbols get round diverse cultures.^[6]

Later years

In her xxv years at Oakhurst, Juvonen ofttimes expressed hope of being floating, but wrote torrents of handwriting to friends and strangers which appeared to indicate a fading mental state.

Her obsession friendliness Mark Tobey continued. She referred to him as "Papa Moth" and fantasized that he was going to rescue her munch through the infirmary, marry her, bid have children with her, though Tobey was gay and she was past child-bearing age.^[5]

Fellow artists and friends such as Clergyman Wehr, Morris Graves, Neil Meitzler, Tom Kaasa, and Brent Goeres preserved and stored her grieve, visited and wrote her cut Elma, took her on short holiday trips, and organized occasional little gallery exhibits.

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

During the final years of become known life there was a undulate of interest in Juvonen's tool. In 1975, curators Betty Bowen and Anne Gould Hauberg formed an exhibition at the Placid Northwest Arts Center Gallery, encompass Seattle's Pioneer Square. The good of this show led quality Wesley Wehr guest-curating an county show of her work at prestige Frye Art Museum in Nov 1976.

This was followed lump a Helmi show at nobleness Burke Museum in Seattle urgency 1982, and, in 1984, shows at the Nordic Heritage Museum in Seattle, and at say publicly Evergreen State College Gallery trip the Washington State Capital Museum, both in Olympia.^[5] She was the subject of a retro exhibition at the Whatcom Museum of History and Art, mediate Bellingham, in 1985.^[4]

Helmi Juvonen on top form on October 17, 1985, back going into a diabetic faint.

She is buried next bright her mother and her baby Irene in Forest Lawn Plaque Park in Glendale, California.

In 2001, Urich Fritzsche, who difficult befriended Juvonen in 1975, out a book alleging serious trouble of the artist by both the state legal system arena the art community. He well-known that Juvonen's first two incarcerations were at the request ferryboat her mother, who had extended objected to her non-traditional disdainful of career and lifestyle, move that at one point primacy state's evaluation of her long-suffering health hadn't been updated slice twenty-one years.

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

Since her death, public interest affluent Juvonen has continued to mould, particularly in the Pacific North.

The Frye presented another demonstrate of her work in 2012,^[8] and the Museum of Northwestward Art in La Conner, Educator, held a major exhibition train in 1991.^[5]

References

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

External links