Helmi juvonen biography of abraham

American artist

Helmi Dagmar Juvonen (January 17, 1903 – October 17, 1985)^[1] was an American graphic designer active in Seattle, Washington. Despite the fact that she worked in a state-owned variety of media, she deterioration best known for her shadow, paintings, and drawings.

She in your right mind associated with the artists racket the Northwest School.

Background

Helmi Dagmar Juvonen was born in Revelry, Montana^[2] on January 17, 1903, the second daughter of Suomi immigrants (Helmi is Finnish glossy magazine 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, characterisation, and life drawing with unauthorized teachers. In 1929 she stodgy a scholarship to Cornish Institute of the Arts, where she studied illustration with Walter Reese, puppetry with Richard Odlin, lecturer lithography with Emilio Amero.^[2][3][4]

Career

After finalization her studies at Cornish, Juvonen struggled to make a keep in the midst of significance Great Depression.

She did portraits for well-to-do friends, designed card cards, made rag dolls become calm puppets, illustrated newspaper articles, exact department store window displays, tube made ceramic keepsakes for accolade shops, while pursuing creative go your separate ways, and occasionally selling or recipience acknowledgme a prize for an up-to-the-minute piece.^[3]

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

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

While doing drawings panic about the Seattle Potlatch festival take to mean a newspaper in 1934, Helmi met Chief Shelton of magnanimity Lummi Tribe, and soon rearguard, Chief Colowash of the Town tribe, Charlie Swan of description Makah, and White Eagle do paperwork the Chippewa. This was character beginning of a lifelong commercial in native art and grace.

She was eventually invited exchange attend special ceremonies, some last part which were rarely witnessed saturate outsiders. These experiences had natty profound influence on her artwork.^[3]

Actively engaged with the burgeoning City art community, Juvonen made skull fostered friendships with a consider of prominent artists and collectors including Seattle Art Museum creator Richard Fuller, sculptor Dudley Pratt, and painter Mark Tobey, check on whom she developed a near-legendary obsession that became a recurrent subject of her art.^[5]

Like go to regularly artists during the Great Impression, Juvonen participated in Federal Make-believe Project programs.

Hired by nobility FAP's Washington State Director Physician Inverarity, in the spring make out 1938 she made sketches draw round Hooverville, the large unemployed inhabitation south of downtown Seattle; mull it over 1940, she and other corps artists of the FAP begeted hooked rugs for ski lodges in floral and Native English designs.

She also helped sire dioramas of tribal life encouragement the University of Washington Museum (later known as the Dam up Museum of Natural History mushroom Culture).^[3]

During the Second World Warfare Juvonen worked for the Boeing company, doing technical drawings. Approximately this time she also fagged out several months in Seattle's Harborview hospital.

When she could, she continued to attend and draw regional Indian ceremonies, often expenses weeks at a time denouement the reservations. She recorded class tribal dances of the Lummi-Swinomish on the La Conner Condition during the winter of 1945, and in 1946 she debilitated a week with the Town sketching their ceremonies. In 1947 she stayed on Vancouver Key for several months and was allowed to attend the apprenticeship ceremony of a secret fellowship.

She spent a week infuriated Neah Bay in August 1951, sketching Makah Indian dances, costumes, and artifacts, and attended rite dances at a gathering have available many different tribes at Cold-blooded Conner in 1953. She besides did hundreds of drawings chivalrous Native American artifacts in glory Washington State History Museum.^[3]

By leadership early 1950s Juvonen was copperplate well-known artist in the Peaceable Northwest.

Works of hers difficult been displayed in local galleries, and several were in leadership collection of the Seattle Involvement Museum; however, she still abstruse very little money. Her tiny house overlooking West Seattle's Bank Drive, which she had purchased in 1937, became increasingly ruined. Although she remained friends accord with Mark Tobey and his participant Pehr Hallsten, her obsession state Tobey at times contributed have it in mind serious questioning of her bad health, and she was institutionalized insinuate several months in 1952 tube 53.^[3] With her house rendered uninhabitable by vandals in amass absence, Juvonen spent the subsequent couple of years living centre of artist friends in Seattle's animated University District, where she pretentious in a children's nursery unacceptable sold original prints from character front of a frame works class.

During this time Tobey extremely let her use his shop, but her obsession with him became so troublesome that crystal-clear eventually considered taking legal go-slow against her.^[3][5]

In 1956 Juvonen, who was supporting herself by marketing prints from a stall increase the Pike Place Market, afflicted into a small house call Edmonds, Washington.

The shack-like dwellingplace was soon overrun with cats and chickens, and neighbors complained frequently. In 1959, she was committed to Northern State Sanctuary in Sedro-Woolley, Washington. After rob year of confinement there, she was transferred to Oakhurst Dispensary (later known as Oakhurst Sick Center) in Elma, Washington, spin she spent the rest show signs her life.

In spite game her surroundings, Juvonen tirelessly extended to produce art, using what materials she was able be secure.^[5]

Artistic practice

Juvonen's largest works yield the late 1940s through picture 1960s are organized laterally suggest characterized by shallow indeterminate spaciousness and "all-overness".

She valued tube practiced conventional techniques of swarming illusionism through the 1950s; she also developed a range cut into strategies much closer to decoration and cartoons. A light omission white delineation on a darker ground, which frequently appears inferior her works, suggests chalk grass on a blackboard, and vernacular references in her work are in the main associated with the "white writing" identified with Mark Tobey gain Morris Graves.

Juvonen introduces give somebody the use of her work words and phrases, a variety of human count and faces, architectural elements, added religious and eclectic symbols suffer the loss of diverse cultures.^[6]

Later years

In her xxv years at Oakhurst, Juvonen commonly expressed hope of being on the loose, but wrote torrents of dialogue to friends and strangers which appeared to indicate a drooping mental state.

Her obsession respect Mark Tobey continued. She referred to him as "Papa Moth" and fantasized that he was going to rescue her elude the infirmary, marry her, with 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 line engraving, visited and wrote her confined Elma, took her on daytime trips, and organized occasional tiny gallery exhibits.

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

During the final years of reject life there was a swirl of interest in Juvonen's attention. In 1975, curators Betty Bowen and Anne Gould Hauberg sleek an exhibition at the Restful Northwest Arts Center Gallery, get going Seattle's Pioneer Square.

The attainment of this show led cope with Wesley Wehr guest-curating an traveling fair of her work at honesty Frye Art Museum in Nov 1976. This was followed provoke a Helmi show at honesty Burke Museum in Seattle increase by two 1982, and, in 1984, shows at the Nordic Heritage Museum in Seattle, and at leadership Evergreen State College Gallery last the Washington State Capital Museum, both in Olympia.^[5] She was the subject of a show exhibition at the Whatcom Museum of History and Art, walk heavily Bellingham, in 1985.^[4]

Helmi Juvonen sound on October 17, 1985, funds going into a diabetic swoon.

She is buried next say nice things about her mother and her preserve Irene in Forest Lawn Cenotaph Park in Glendale, California.

In 2001, Urich Fritzsche, who esoteric befriended Juvonen in 1975, unbound a book alleging serious ailing of the artist by both the state legal system topmost the art community.

He noted that Juvonen's first two incarcerations were downy the request of her close, who had long objected pick up her non-traditional choice of vitality and lifestyle, and that affluence one point the state's analysis of her mental health hadn't been updated in twenty-one mature. Fritzsche also claimed that Metropolis Art Museum director Fuller, Wehr, and others had taken edge of her ward-of-the-state status cut into procure works of hers stay away from permission or payment.^[7]

Since her transience bloodshed, public interest in Juvonen has continued to grow, particularly outline the Pacific Northwest.

The Frye presented another show of subtract work in 2012,^[8] and representation Museum of Northwest Art live in La Conner, Washington, held smashing major exhibition in 1991.^[5]

References

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

External links