Helen McBride Richter b. 1950

Helen McBride Richter is a fiber artist born and raised in Red Hook, Brooklyn. She received degrees in nursing and midwifery from the University of Pennsylvania and Emory University. Richter also completed courses in textile design at the Parsons School of Design, and studied in artist workshops, including that of ceramicist Abbas Ahuwanat and textile artist Nancy Crow.

Richter's work is imbued with the essence of her upbringing in mid-twentieth century New York City. Born one of twelve children, she is the daughter of an African American Baptist minister father and white Jewish mother, whose heartwarming story has been chronicled in the New York Times bestseller The Color of Water. Helen and her siblings followed their Yiddish-speaking mother around all corners of New York—the Lower East Side, Harlem, museums, libraries, the Garment District, and, of course, the tiny African American church their parents founded in 1954 that still stands today. As a child, Richter was fascinated by the lively colors in the buttons and cloth that the women in her life handled. She became a young collector of these items, and as a girl swept floors in the Garment District, where kindly bead vendors allowed her to keep the beads and scraps she swept up. She later worked at a clothing factory in Red Hook, where the Spanish-speaking women encouraged her sewing skills. Richter also learned knitting and quilting from her mother and the other women in their church community, most of whom were African Americans from the South. She saved pieces of the fabric they gave her for decades, some of which she still incorporates into her work today. Richter's abstract compositions made up of saturated, hand-dyed cloth celebrate not just New York, but the diversity, community, and human connection that defined her youth there.

Richter has exhibited in both the United States and Europe, including exhibitions at the Portrait Society Gallery of Contemporary Art in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the International Quilt Museum in Lincoln, Nebraska, and the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art in Atlanta, Georgia.