Winfred Rembert

(American, 1945-2021) A native of Cuthbert, Georgia, Winfred Rembert spent his childhood as a fieldworker in the pre-civil rights South. Brought up by his great-aunt ("Mama"), Rembert painted stories that look back to his youth in the days of segregation. Despite the often grim working conditions he encountered (not to mention a near-lynching and years spent on a prison chain gang), Rembert's works focus on the joyous aspects of black life in the 1950s South — the strong family and community bonds, the cultural vibrancy, and the many colorful characters that lifted the spirits of those who had little choice but to labor in the region's cotton and peanut fields.

Marked by tactile surfaces, saturated colors, and lively, rhythmic patterning, Rembert's works are painted on leather sheets that he hand tooled and then dyed. These energetic compositions — with their engaging narratives of life in the rural South — have brought Rembert comparisons to noted African-American artists Hale Woodruff, Jacob Lawrence, Horace Pippin, and Romare Bearden. Rembert, who was self-taught, lived and worked in New Haven, Connecticut. His paintings are represented in a number of important public and private collections, and were the subject of a major exhibition at the Yale University Art Gallery in 2000.

In recent years, Rembert has had solo shows at the Hudson River Museum (Yonkers, NY), The Greenville County Museum of Art (Greenville, SC), The Citadelle Art Foundation (Canadian, TX), The Flint Institute of Arts (Flint, MI), the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts (Montgomery, AL), and the Danforth Art Museum (Framingham, MA). He is the subject of two award-winning documentary films, “All Me: The Life and Time of Winfred Rembert” (dir. Vivian Ducat, 2011) and the New Yorker documentary “Ashes to Ashes” (dir. Taylor Rees, 2019), about the legacy of lynching in America. The book “Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist’s Memoir of the Jim Crow South” by Winfred Rembert, as told to Erin I. Kelly, with a foreword by Bryan Stevenson, was published in September 2021, and won the Pulitzer Prize in 2022.