Winfred Rembert USA, 1945-2021

Winfred Rembert (1945-2021) was born in Americus, Georgia and grew up in nearby Cuthbert— a rural railroad town located in the southwest region of the state, once at the center of the Deep South’s plantation economy. Living in Cuthbert during the era of Jim Crow, Rembert was exposed to the exploitative practices of the sharecropping system at a young age. Spending much of his childhood alongside family members working in the fields, Rembert received a limited education. Despite the infrequency of his attendance, a dedicated teacher by the name of Miss Prather recognized Rembert’s artistic talent and encouraged him to express his creativity through drawing.

As a teenager, Rembert was deeply influenced by the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement in Americus, Georgia, and his active participation led to confrontations with law enforcement. In 1965, while attending a peaceful protest which was attacked by white antagonists, he fled from the assailants in a stolen car, and was subsequently arrested for the theft. In 1967, still incarcerated while awaiting charges, Rembert escaped from jail. Following his ensuing capture by an angry white mob, Rembert survived a near-lynching. For the next seven years of his life, he was transferred to multiple penitentiaries within the Georgia prison system, enduring taxing physical labor while working on various chain gangs— a harrowing experience that would later prove central to the narrative of his extraordinary art.

Rembert learned how to tool and craft leather from a fellow prisoner—the technique he would later use to share his story with the world. Following his release from prison, in 1974, Rembert married Patsy Gammage and they eventually settled in New Haven, Connecticut. At the age of fifty-one, with his wife’s encouragement, he began a full-time artistic practice. Combining his mastery of leather working with his skilled draftsmanship he created a unique and prolific body of autobiographical paintings. Rembert continued to make art for nearly twenty-five years, before his death on March 31, 2021, at the age of 75.

Over the course of his career, Rembert embraced a variety of styles and pictorial strategies. His works range from purely illustrative to verging on the abstract. In many of the early paintings, the materiality of his media is immediately apparent. In such works, Rembert rendered his figures in muted tones to compliment the natural color of the leather backgrounds. In other works, bright- colored pigments cover the entire surface of densely packed compositions.

Recalling the achievements of African American figurative masters such as Jacob Lawrence, Hale Woodruff, and Horace Pippin, Rembert’s deeply personal artworks foreground truths about the aftermath of slavery and the persistence of racial injustice in America. They also capture moments of joy and celebrate people and places of the artist’s community.