Couture fashion is fractured into dense color and line in Helen Rae’s drawings. She used the dramatic photography of magazine editorials and advertisements as inspiration, paying especially close attention to the patterns of textiles as she reimagined and distorted designer clothes and their models. A flattened perspective merges the bold folds of drapery—accented with heavy solid lines—against frenetic backgrounds or expansive planes of bright color. Often the pressure from her hand is still visible on the paper as she filled almost every space on the sheet with colored pencil and graphite.
Rae was born in 1938 and grew up in Claremont, California, where her father was on the faculty at the Claremont Colleges. Both deaf and nonverbal, she learned sign language but found her greatest expressiveness in art. In 1990, when she was fifty-two years old, her mother enrolled her in a local arts program for adults with disabilities at the First Street Gallery and Art Center (now the Tierra Del Sol Studio Art Program). There she experimented with a range of media, such as watercolor and ceramic masks, as well as the colored pencils for which her drawings would be known. She would flip through the glossy pages of fashion magazines until she found an image to serve as a starting point for a drawing, frequently spending days on a single piece as she carefully covered a standard 24 × 18 sheet of paper with vibrant detail.
She had her first solo show in 2015 at the Good Luck Gallery in Los Angeles, a solo show in 2017 at White Columns in New York, and a large selection of her works was included in the exhibition The Way I See It: Selections from the KAWS Collection in 2024–2025 at The Drawing Center in New York. Her work quickly attracted critical acclaim and coverage in major publications, including a feature in the pages of Vogue that paired her drawings with the fashion photography that had inspired them. Rae regularly attended her openings as creatively adorned as the models in her drawings, wearing flowers and pearls in her hair and colorful jewelry. She died in 2021.
Allison C. Meier, 2025
Text written as part of “Rethinking Biography,” an initiative supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).
