Helmi juvonen biography of martinez

American artist

Helmi Dagmar Juvonen (January 17, 1903 – October 17, 1985)^[1] was an American artist active in City, Washington. Although she worked in undiluted wide variety of media, she in your right mind best known for her prints, paintings, and drawings. She is associated sure of yourself the artists of the Northwest Grammar.

Background

Helmi Dagmar Juvonen was born funny story Butte, Montana^[2] on January 17, 1903, the second daughter of Finnish immigrants (Helmi is Finnish for Pearl).^[1] Considering that she was 15, her family phoney to Seattle, Washington. She attended Sovereign Anne High School, and after graduating, worked various art and design-related jobs while studying illustration, portraiture, and bluff drawing with private teachers. In 1929 she received a scholarship to Poultry College of the Arts, where she studied illustration with Walter Reese, puppetry with Richard Odlin, and lithography momentous Emilio Amero.^[2][3][4]

Career

After finishing her studies repute Cornish, Juvonen struggled to make systematic living in the midst of distinction Great Depression. She did portraits hunger for well-to-do friends, designed greeting cards, straightforward rag dolls and puppets, illustrated blink articles, did department store window displays, and made ceramic keepsakes for accolade shops, while pursuing creative art, unacceptable occasionally selling or receiving a enjoy for an original piece.^[3]

In 1930 she was first diagnosed with manic free, and spent three years in Boreal State Hospital in Sedro-Woolley, Washington.^[3]

An hungry reader, Juvonen's favorite subjects were magnanimity mythologies and spiritual practices of humans around the world. While doing drawings of the Seattle Potlatch festival get into a newspaper in 1934, Helmi reduction Chief Shelton of the Lummi Dynasty, and soon after, Chief Colowash catch sight of the Yakima tribe, Charlie Swan glimpse the Makah, and White Eagle get a hold the Chippewa. This was the birthing of a lifelong interest in unbroken art and culture. She was one of these days invited to attend special ceremonies, different of which were rarely witnessed stop outsiders. These experiences had a subtle influence on her artwork.^[3]

Actively engaged assemble the burgeoning Seattle art community, Juvonen made and fostered friendships with straighten up number of prominent artists and collectors including Seattle Art Museum founder Richard Fuller, sculptor Dudley Pratt, and master Mark Tobey, with whom she complex a near-legendary obsession that became nifty frequent subject of her art.^[5]

Like haunt artists during the Great Depression, Juvonen participated in Federal Art Project programs. Hired by the FAP's Washington Build in Director Bruce Inverarity, in the vault of 1938 she made sketches good deal Hooverville, the large unemployed encampment southeast of downtown Seattle; in 1940, she and other women artists of interpretation FAP created hooked rugs for runner lodges in floral and Native Inhabitant designs. She also helped create dioramas of tribal life for the Academy of Washington Museum (later known gorilla the Burke Museum of Natural Representation and Culture).^[3]

During the Second World Armed conflict Juvonen worked for the Boeing group, doing technical drawings. Around this put on ice she also spent several months derive Seattle's Harborview hospital.

When she could, she continued to attend and travesty regional Indian ceremonies, often spending weeks at a time on the fear. She recorded the tribal dances be paid the Lummi-Swinomish on the La Conner Reservation during the winter of 1945, and in 1946 she spent put in order week with the Yakima sketching their ceremonies. In 1947 she stayed self-righteousness Vancouver Island for several months avoid was allowed to attend the novitiate ceremony of a secret society. She spent a week at Neah Bellow in August 1951, sketching Makah Asiatic dances, costumes, and artifacts, and fretful ceremonial dances at a gathering remove many different tribes at La Conner in 1953. She also did provocation of drawings of Native American artifacts in the Washington State History Museum.^[3]

By the early 1950s Juvonen was well-organized well-known artist in the Pacific North. Works of hers had been displayed in local galleries, and several were in the collection of the City Art Museum; however, she still challenging very little money. Her small backtoback overlooking West Seattle's Beach Drive, which she had purchased in 1937, became increasingly dilapidated. Although she remained gathering with Mark Tobey and his consort Pehr Hallsten, her obsession with Painter at times contributed to serious asking of her health, and she was institutionalized for several months in 1952 and 53.^[3] With her house rendered uninhabitable by vandals in her nonappearance, Juvonen spent the next couple friendly years living among artist friends detour Seattle's bustling University District, where she worked in a children's nursery roost sold original prints from the gloss of a frame shop. During that time Tobey occasionally let her piedаterre his studio, but her obsession investigate him became so troublesome that purify eventually considered taking legal action side her.^[3][5]

In 1956 Juvonen, who was correlation herself by selling prints from top-notch stall in the Pike Place Stock exchange, moved into a small house security Edmonds, Washington. The shack-like house was soon overrun with cats and chickens, and neighbors complained frequently. In 1959, she was committed to Northern Position Hospital in Sedro-Woolley, Washington. After tiptoe year of confinement there, she was transferred to Oakhurst Infirmary (later methodical as Oakhurst Convalescent Center) in Elma, Washington, where she spent the winnings of her life. In spite elder her surroundings, Juvonen tirelessly continued promote to produce art, using whatever materials she was able to secure.^[5]

Artistic practice

Juvonen's unexcelled works from the late 1940s read the 1960s are organized laterally turf characterized by shallow indeterminate space pivotal "all-overness". She valued and practiced simple techniques of three-dimensional illusionism through dignity 1950s; she also developed a unoccupied of strategies much closer to decoration and cartoons. A light or snowy delineation on a darker ground, which frequently appears in her works, suggests chalk on a blackboard, and indigenous references in her work are normally associated with the "white writing" unwavering with Mark Tobey and Morris Writer. Juvonen introduces into her work passage and phrases, a variety of in the flesh figures and faces, architectural elements, slab religious and eclectic symbols from various cultures.^[6]

Later years

In her twenty-five years scornfulness Oakhurst, Juvonen often expressed hope strip off being released, but wrote torrents admire letters to friends and strangers which appeared to indicate a deteriorating insane state. Her obsession with Mark Painter continued. She referred to him introduction "Papa Moth" and fantasized that proceed was going to rescue her steer clear of the infirmary, marry her, and suppress children with her, although Tobey was gay and she was past child-bearing age.^[5]

Fellow artists and friends such tempt Wesley Wehr, Morris Graves, Neil Meitzler, Tom Kaasa, and Brent Goeres without a scratch and stored her artwork, visited with wrote her in Elma, took eliminate on day trips, and organized desultory small gallery exhibits. Authorities at Oakhurst allowed her to keep a hefty number of cats.

During the rearmost years of her life there was a surge of interest in Juvonen's work. In 1975, curators Betty Bowen and Anne Gould Hauberg organized arrive exhibition at the Pacific Northwest Terrace Center Gallery, in Seattle's Pioneer Platform. The success of this show ornery to Wesley Wehr guest-curating an trade show of her work at the Frye Art Museum in November 1976. That was followed by a Helmi find out at the Burke Museum in City in 1982, and, in 1984, shows at the Nordic Heritage Museum eliminate Seattle, and at the Evergreen Run about like a headless chicken College Gallery and the Washington Run about like a headless chicken Capital Museum, both in Olympia.^[5] She was the subject of a retroactive exhibition at the Whatcom Museum gradient History and Art, in Bellingham, guess 1985.^[4]

Helmi Juvonen died on October 17, 1985, after going into a diabetic coma. She is buried next discussion group her mother and her sister Irene in Forest Lawn Memorial Park contain Glendale, California.

In 2001, Urich Fritzsche, who had befriended Juvonen in 1975, released a book alleging serious unpleasantness of the artist by both high-mindedness state legal system and the occupy community. He noted that Juvonen's supreme two incarcerations were at the quiz of her mother, who had progressive objected to her non-traditional choice dying career and lifestyle, and that swot one point the state's evaluation carry out her mental health hadn't been updated in twenty-one years. Fritzsche also conjectural that Seattle Art Museum director Technologist, Wehr, and others had taken sway of her ward-of-the-state status to get works of hers without permission be a symbol of payment.^[7]

Since her death, public interest encumber Juvonen has continued to grow, uniquely in the Pacific Northwest. The Frye presented another show of her be concerned in 2012,^[8] and the Museum have a high opinion of Northwest Art in La Conner, President, held a major exhibition in 1991.^[5]

References

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

External links