Winfred Rembert

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Winfred Rembert (22 November 1945 – 31 March 2021) was an African-American artist who used hand-tools and shoe dye on leather canvases.

Winfred Rembert grew up in Cuthbert, Georgia, where he spent much of his childhood laboring in the cotton fields. During a 1960s civil rights march, he was arrested without being charged. He spent seven years on a chain gang and survived a lynching. As a prisoner, he learned to make tooled-leather wallets and to design on leather.[1] Rembert stretched, tooled, and dyed leather using shoe dye to depict scenes from the rural Jim Crow south where he was born and raised. As the colors in shoe dye that were available to him became more vivid, so did his paintings. In April 2010, Rembert had his first one-man show in New York City, Memories of My Youth, at the Adelson Galleries, then located on east 82nd Street. For much of his adult life, Rembert was a resident of New Haven, CT, where he lived with his wife, Patsy, and eight children. He was a well-known figure in his neighborhood, Newhallville, where he was always referred to as "Pops."

An award-winning feature-length documentary film about his life, All Me: The Life and Times of Winfred Rembert, directed by Vivian Ducat, was released in 2011. It won Audience Awards and other citations at the Chicago International Film Festival, Heartland Film Festival, Arlington International Film Festival,[2] Hamptons Take 2 Documentary Film Festival (now called the Hamptons Doc Fest) and others. The film has also been shown at the Library of Congress and has been screened across the US and Canada, often accompanied by exhibits of Rembert's paintings. When his health allowed, Rembert would accompany the film, taking the opportunity to speak to high school students as well as to film audiences. Members of his family would often travel with him. The documentary also was screened on television during the first season of the PBS American Documentary series, America Reframed.

A short documentary, Ashes to Ashes, honoring victims of lynchings in the South, featured Rembert, the "only known survivor of a lynching." Ashes to Ashes premiered at the Mountainfilm Festival on May 24, 2019.[3][4][5]

Rembert himself was a winner of several significant awards. He was honored by the Equal Justice Initiative in 2015, and was awarded a United States Artists Barr Fellowship in 2016.

In the final years of his life, he worked with author Erin Kelly, to write a book of his story: Chasing Me to My Grave: A Artist's Memoir of the Jim Crow South to be released in the fall of 2021.

Rembert died at 75 on March 31, 2021, at his home in New Haven, Connecticut.[6]

In the obituary in The New York Times, Katharine Q. Seelye described Rembert as turning "painful memories into art. Decades after nearly being lynched in rural Georgia, he began recreating vivid scenes from his life by carving figures into leather."[7]

Early life[]

Winfred Rembert was born on November 22, 1945, in Cuthbert, Randolph County, Georgia.[8] Raised by his aunt after his mother cheated on her husband, he worked in the cotton fields, making as little as twenty cents per day. His laboring caused him to miss school two days a week, and he could not read or write until high school. With rising racial tensions in his neighborhood, he cut school at the age of 16.

Rembert has been the subject of two documentaries and several news stories where he is reported to be one of only a few people known to have survived a lynching during the Jim Crow era.[9][10][11][12]

References[]

  1. ^ Schwendener, Martha (March 16, 2012). "Odyssey Through Jim Crow Era, Carved in Leather". The New York Times. Retrieved October 20, 2012.
  2. ^ Herwick, Edgar B. (III) (October 10, 2012). "Film Festival Brings a Diverse World to the Big Screen in Arlington". WGBH (FM). Retrieved October 20, 2012.
  3. ^ "Ashes to Ashes". Mountainfilm. May 7, 2019. Retrieved June 26, 2019.
  4. ^ "He Survived A Near-Lynching. 50 Years Later, He's Still Healing". NPR.org. Retrieved November 15, 2019.
  5. ^ "When You Finally Told Me". StoryCorps. February 4, 2020.
  6. ^ Bass, Paul (April 1, 2021). "Beloved Artist Winfred Rembert, 75, Dies". New Haven Independent. Retrieved April 1, 2021.
  7. ^ Seelye, Katharine Q. (April 4, 2021). "Winfred Rembert, 75, Dies; Turned Painful Memories Into Art". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved April 5, 2021.
  8. ^ Rembert, Winfred; Bartholomew F. Bland (2012). Winfred Rembert: Amazing Grace. Hudson River Museum. ISBN 9780943651415. Retrieved October 23, 2012.
  9. ^ Ketchum III, William E. (January 9, 2013). "Near lynching, prison time, and segregated south covered in upcoming Flint Institute of Arts exhibit". mlive.com. Retrieved June 29, 2019.
  10. ^ Schwendener, Martha (March 16, 2012). "A Review of 'Winfred Rembert: Amazing Grace,' at the Hudson River Museum". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved June 29, 2019.
  11. ^ Dewey, Charlsie (February 5, 2018). "Artist Winfred Rembert Documents Black Life with his Paintings". GR|MAG. Retrieved June 29, 2019.
  12. ^ Doherty, Donna (May 13, 2010). "Winfred Rembert's first solo show confirms what many already knew about his leather paintings (video, slideshow)". New Haven Register. Retrieved June 29, 2019.

Further reading[]

  • Adelson, Warren; Reynolds, Jock (2010). Winfred Rembert: Memories of My Youth.. New York: Adelson Galleries. Exhibition catalog.

External links[]

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