Helmi Juvonen

She attended Queen Anne High School, and after graduating, worked various art and design-related jobs while studying illustration, portraiture, and life drawing with private teachers.

In 1929 she received a scholarship to Cornish College of the Arts, where she studied illustration with Walter Reese, puppetry with Richard Odlin, and lithography with Emilio Amero.

[3] With her house rendered uninhabitable by vandals in her absence, Juvonen spent the next couple of years living among artist friends in Seattle's bustling University District, where she worked in a children's nursery and sold original prints from the front of a frame shop.

Juvonen introduces into her work words and phrases, a variety of human figures and faces, architectural elements, and religious and eclectic symbols from diverse cultures.

[6] In her twenty-five years at Oakhurst, Juvonen often expressed hope of being released, but wrote torrents of letters to friends and strangers which appeared to indicate a deteriorating mental state.

She referred to him as "Papa Moth" and fantasized that he was going to rescue her from the infirmary, marry her, and have children with her, although Tobey was gay and she was past child-bearing age.

[5] Fellow artists and friends such as Wesley Wehr, Morris Graves, Neil Meitzler, Tom Kaasa, and Brent Goeres preserved and stored her artwork, visited and wrote her in Elma, took her on day trips, and organized occasional small gallery exhibits.

In 1975, curators Betty Bowen and Anne Gould Hauberg organized an exhibition at the Pacific Northwest Arts Center Gallery, in Seattle's Pioneer Square.

In 2001, Urich Fritzsche, who had befriended Juvonen in 1975, released a book alleging serious mistreatment of the artist by both the state legal system and the art community.

He noted that Juvonen's first two incarcerations were at the request of her mother, who had long objected to her non-traditional choice of career and lifestyle, and that at one point the state's evaluation of her mental health hadn't been updated in twenty-one years.

Fritzsche also claimed that Seattle Art Museum director Fuller, Wehr, and others had taken advantage of her ward-of-the-state status to procure works of hers without permission or payment.