Helen Rae

1938-2021 · Claremont, California, USA

Deaf and non-verbal, Helen Rae worked at the same studio table for three decades, turning fashion adverts into images far stranger and stronger than anything on the runway.

The life

Rae was born in Claremont, California in 1938. From 1990 she worked at First Street Gallery Art Center in Upland, a progressive studio for adults with developmental disabilities, where she developed her practice of redrawing fashion magazine spreads. Her first solo exhibition came in 2016, when she was in her late seventies, and acclaim followed fast: shows in New York, Europe and Japan, and the Wynn Newhouse Award in 2018. She died in Claremont in 2021.

The work

Coloured pencil and graphite on paper, taking glossy fashion photography as a starting point and torquing it into flattened space, dense pattern and saturated, unexpected colour, the models’ faces and hands reworked until they belong to her world, not the magazine’s. Her work is held by the Museum of Modern Art and the American Folk Art Museum in New York.

Why we love them

She took the glossiest, most disposable images we make and sent them back with real power. The magazines should have been copying her.

Go deeper

• Helen Rae at the Outsider Art Fair
• Helen Rae on Wikipedia
• Where to see outsider art, our full list of museums and collections.
• The glossary, if any of the terms here are new.

Kindred spirits

← Back to the field guide