Winfred Rembert
Winfred Rembert (November 22, 1945 – March 31, 2021) was an
Personal life
Winfred Rembert was born on November 22, 1945, in Cuthbert, Randolph County, Georgia.[1] Raised by his great aunt, he worked in the cotton fields, making as little as 20 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.
In 1974, Rembert married to Patsy Rembert, a young woman he had met while he was serving time on a chain gang. They married upon his release. Their first child was Winfred Rembert, Jr.[2] followed by seven more children. Rembert died on March 31, 2021, at the age of 75, at his home in New Haven, Connecticut.[3][4] In his New York Times obituary, Katharine Q. Seelye described Rembert as turning "painful memories into art."[5]
Career
During a civil rights march in the 1960s, Rembert 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.[6] 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, Memories of My Youth, at the Adelson Galleries in New York City. For much of his adult life, Rembert was a resident of New Haven, Connecticut, 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
Rembert has been the subject of another documentary and several news stories in which he is reported to be one of only a few people known to have survived a lynching during the
Rembert himself was a winner of several significant awards. He was honored by the
References
- ISBN 9780943651415. Retrieved October 23, 2012.
- ^ "Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist's Memoir of the Jim Crow South, by the late Winfred Rembert as told to Erin I. Kelly". The Pulitzer Prizes. Retrieved February 27, 2024.
- ^ https://news.artnet.com/news-pro/art-detective-winfred-rembert-2184531
- ^ Bass, Paul (April 1, 2021). "Beloved Artist Winfred Rembert, 75, Dies". New Haven Independent. Retrieved April 1, 2021.
- ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved April 5, 2021.
- ^ Schwendener, Martha (March 16, 2012). "Odyssey Through Jim Crow Era, Carved in Leather". The New York Times. Retrieved October 20, 2012.
- ^ 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.
- ^ 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.
- ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved June 29, 2019.
- ^ Dewey, Charlsie (February 5, 2018). "Artist Winfred Rembert Documents Black Life with his Paintings". GR|MAG. Retrieved June 29, 2019.
- ^ 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.
- ^ "Ashes to Ashes". Mountainfilm. May 7, 2019. Retrieved June 26, 2019.
- ^ Esty-Kendall, Jud; Avery Ellfeldt (November 15, 2019). "He Survived A Near-Lynching. 50 Years Later, He's Still Healing". NPR.org. Retrieved November 15, 2019.
- ^ "When You Finally Told Me". StoryCorps. February 4, 2020.
- ^ "The 2022 Pulitzer Prize Winner in Biography: Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist's Memoir of the Jim Crow South, by the late Winfred Rembert as told to Erin I. Kelly (Bloomsbury)". The Pulitzer Prizes. Retrieved July 15, 2023.
- ^ "2022 Pulitzer Prize Media Kit". May 9, 2022.
Further reading
- Rembert, Winfred; Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist's Memoir of the Jim Crow South. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing.
- Adelson, Warren; Reynolds, Jock (2010). Winfred Rembert: Memories of My Youth. New York: Adelson Galleries. Exhibition catalog.
External links
- "All Me: The Life and Times of Winfred Rembert". allmethemovie.com. Retrieved October 20, 2014.
- Ann and William Oppenhimer. "The Indelible Images of Winfred Rembert". Folk Art Society of America. Retrieved October 20, 2014.