African-American self-taught artist Winfred Rembert used the leather tooling skills he learned in prison to create powerful depictions of his time growing up in the Jim Crow South, and experiences such as surviving a near-lynching and serving on a chain gang during his incarceration.
Read MoreWinfred Rembert was born in 1945 in Americus, Georgia. He was raised in nearby Cuthbert by his great-aunt. He grew up working on cotton and peanut farms with little education, unable to read or write.
In 1965, at the age of 19, Rembert attended a civil rights protest which escalated violently. While trying to escape, he was arrested and detained without charges or trial. During his imprisonment in the local jail, Rembert protested by clogging his toilet with paper and tried to escape after the sheriff pulled his gun on him. Rembert was caught and brought to a crowd standing in front of a tree with nooses. He was hung by his feet and nearly castrated before being taken down, chained and marched in the streets as a violent example to the Black community.
Rembert is one of the only known survivors of a lynching. Afterward he would spend seven years in a maximum-security prison and was forced to work on a chain gang. He was released in 1974. These horrific memories of segregation, racism and injustice would later form the cornerstone of his artistic practice.
While in prison, Rembert learned from a fellow inmate how to tool leather and make wallets. Following his release he kept up these skills to make occasional gifts for his family, working from Bridgeport, then New Haven, Connecticut where he had moved with his wife. After a gifted illustration in leather for a friend sparked local interest in his work, Rembert was encouraged to make more leather artwork about his personal experiences.
His subject matter reflects the moments of joy amidst suffering during a childhood in the Jim Crow South, as well as the realities of adulthood serving an unjust sentence of hard labour. Scenes of life at gospel churches, pool rooms and jazz clubs can be seen alongside images of digging ditches or picking cotton. His work is often rhythmic, filled with white dots of cotton or the stripes of white and black prison uniforms.
From 1996 to his death in 2021, Rembert was a prolific artist and very active in his local art scene. In 1998 he enjoyed his first solo exhibition at the York Square Cinema in New Haven. A year later he met the director of Yale University Art Gallery, who soon organised an exhibition of his and Harlem Renaissance-era painter Hale Woodruff's work.
Hand-tooled and hand-dyed, Rembert's leather compositions of segregated life have been compared to earlier African American artists such as Jacob Lawrence, Horace Pippin and Romare Bearden. Rembert's story and medium of choice, however, endows his oeuvre with a singular but essential message in American art history.
Winfred Rembert's work is held in many prominent American collections, including the Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia; Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, Los Angeles, California; Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minnesota; and National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
Winfred Rembert enjoyed several accolades in his lifetime including a United States Artists Barr Fellowship in 2016 and an honour by the Equal Justice Initiative in 2015. His hometown of Cuthbert, Georgia even created a Winfred Rembert Day in his honour in 2011.
In 2022, he was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography for his memoir Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist's Memoir of the Jim Crow South (2021).
Winfred Rembert has been the subject of both solo and group exhibitions.
Solo exhibitions include: Southern Roots: The Paintings of Winfred Rembert, The Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio (2018–2019); Southern Roots: The Paintings of Winfred Rembert, The Muskegon Museum of Arts, Muskegon, Michigan (2017); Winfred Rembert: Amazing Grace, New Haven Museum, New Haven, Connecticut (2015); and Winfred Rembert: Beyond Memory, Danforth Art Museum, Framingham, Massachusetts (2013–2014).
Group exhibitions include: Start Talking: Contemporary Art from the Collection of Hedy Fischer and Randy Shull, North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, North Carolina (2022); Soul Deep: African-American Masterworks, Greenville County Museum of Art, Greenville, South Carolina (2021–2022); and Southern Exposure: Works by Winfred Rembert and Hale Woodruff, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut (2000).
Articles on Winfred Rembert have been published in various publications, including ARTnews, The New Yorker, and Vanity Fair.
Rachel Kubrick | Ocula | 2023
