![](data:image/svg+xml;utf8,<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" version="1.1" height="3239px" width="4769px"></svg>)
Resiliency and Joy: Winfred Rembert’s Artistic Legacy
The artist learned to work leather during the Civil Rights Movement, and he used the medium to testify to his experience living in the American South and to celebrate African American community.
I n his foreword to Winfred Rembert’s memoirs, the Civil Rights attorney Bryan Stevenson notes that the artist’s stretched-leather canvases contain “love, strength, humor, and the power and complexity of the Black experience in America distilled into some of the most compelling art I’ve ever seen.” Rembert’s incised and dyed-leather images of Black life in the Jim Crow South – both its harrowing ordeals and centers of vibrant, joyous community – ensure that the past and all its richness cannot be erased.
Seven of Rembert’s paintings featured in Visions of America tell a mostly autobiographical history of African American life in the mid-20th-century southern United States. Rembert was denied a complete education in Georgia and was forced to pick cotton in a harsh sharecropping economy. He participated in the Civil Rights Movement. He survived an attempted lynching, only to be imprisoned for years of unimaginably brutal incarceration on a chain gang. Yet while his art is certainly concerned with such painful moments in American history, his work also depicts scenes of joy and immeasurable courage.
Rembert’s art contains “love, strength, humor, and the power and complexity of the Black experience in America distilled into some of the most compelling art I’ve ever seen.”
- Bryan Stevenson, Civil Rights Attorney
Rembert, who was born in Cuthbert, Georgia in 1945, was raised by his great-aunt on a plantation; at age five, he was given a sack and shown how to pick. The artist later wrote in his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography: “Cotton was the first thing in my life. The very first thing I remember.” The South’s sharecropper economy kept African Americans in a cycle that Rembert calls “a slavery-like situation,” where workers were held in perpetual debt to plantation owners for housing and food that they could never pay off. The monotonous and poorly compensated work that Rembert and his family endured under brutal conditions became a recurring motif of his oeuvre.
In Untitled (Babys Wee Havin), brilliant snow-white cotton balls accent the sharecroppers’ colorful clothing, which in turn grounds the harsh scene in resplendent beauty. The painting depicts rows of cotton fields with several Black workers; in the middle, a woman with her back on a blanket spreads her legs while giving birth to a child. The scene memorializes several occasions on which Winfred saw women give birth in the fields, only to be sent right back to work.
In his memoirs, Rembert recalls the sense of hope he felt while listening to a reverend and his family singing southern hymns in the cotton field – a feeling which is transcends into exuberance in Untitled (Benevolence Church Gospel), in which a Georgia congregation crowds around an animated preacher and musicians spread the Word. Later in life, while living in the North, Rembert became a church deacon and leader of his community.
Rembert was schooled infrequently – as shown in a late self-portrait – at the command of the white plantation owners, yet he found avenues to escape the grueling labor. Fed up with cotton work, Rembert ran away from home. The nearby Curvey watering hole became a place of refuge for him and other children who’d skipped school. The Curvey (A Swimming Hole for Playing Hookey from School) shows jubilant teenagers jumping at the base of a waterfall, its vibrant blues and deep greens rendering a paradisiacal scene. The work captures a momentous shift in the artist’s biography as he increasingly sought out the pleasures and safety of an African American community.
Eventually, Rembert got a gig running a pool hall in Cuthbert on Hamilton Avenue, where he integrated himself with a group of prosperous Black-owned businesses – as well as a riveting nightlife. The lively scene depicted Untitled (The Dirty Spoon Café) – four sharply dressed, African American couples dance to three brass instruments on a checkered floor – recalls Rembert’s memories of observing the juke joint for adults as a teenager. The club is depicted with an emancipatory quality – celebratory scenes like this one express pure delight and prosperity in Rembert’s work. “A lot of good things have happened to me, but Hamilton Avenue was the best,” wrote Rembert. “Nothing can match it.”
In Cuthbert, he became increasingly involved in the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement – especially at Americus, the site of some of Georgia’s famous sit-ins and demonstrations. The movement in Cuthbert was curtailed by the threat of violent white retaliation, but in 1965 Rembert took part in a large march down Main Street, where he willingly “was putting my life on the line” rather than living in a cycle of oppression.
The most dangerous threat that demonstrators faced was lynching. Untitled (Mr Alexander, Mama, and Me Sneaked Up on a Hanging) depicts two Black men hanging from a tree, surrounded by white men wielding guns and clubs – a terrible scene that Rembert witnessed as a child. Years later, while fleeing a white mob during a march in Americus, he was arrested for stealing a car and beaten in jail. He escaped but was shortly recaptured by the police. Then a lynch mob abducted him and locked him in the trunk of a car. They drove him to a tree, hung him by his feet and attempted to mutilate his genitals. While Rembert survived, he was left with lifelong pain in his groin and ultimately incarcerated for ten years.
“An overarching theme of Rembert’s art … is the power of memory, place and emotions, as they embody the reality of an African American boy growing up during a critical turning point in Civil Rights history.”
- Caroline Tamposi, AVP, Specialist, Americana
Untitled (Eleven on the Chain Gang) shows the hard labor Rembert suffered for the last seven years of his sentence: eleven men in black-and-white striped prison uniforms strike large hammers into the ground. Prison uniforms are another recurring motif throughout the artist’s work, and Rembert depicts them with an alluring starkness. He boldly captures the grueling reality of working year-round on a chain gain in a visually stunning patterned composition.
While certainly the most difficult period of his life, in prison Rembert learned to work leather from another inmate. After his release, Rembert married his wife, Patsy, who’d served as a pillar throughout his sentence, and the couple moved to Connecticut to raise their family. At age 50, and at Patsy’s suggestion, he began rendering his memories on leather. After acquiring a usable square hide, Rembert sprayed it with water to make it more supple. Then he would lay a drawing over it and trace it in pencil, imprinting it onto the leather, which he would bevel and dye.
He was initially plagued by insecurity, to say nothing of the difficulties of facing resurfaced trauma. However, with the support of his family and friends, he began his extraordinary career as an artist, which sustained him until his passing in 2021. It is telling that for each horrific memory that Rembert inscribed, he seemed to recall another with compassion. “Winfred Rembert’s art reflects an amalgamation of time and emotions that absorb the viewer into his past; witnessing the moments he experienced from a first person point of view,” says Caroline Tamposi, an Americana specialist at Sotheby’s. “His compositions include everyday tasks with life-changing events as well as emotions of fear, hate and violence with love, happiness and community.”
Tamposi continues: “An overarching theme of Rembert’s art – whether it be the happiest times at the swimming hole, jazz club and singing in church, or the darkest of times on the chain gang, struggling to read and witnessing lynchings and child birth in cotton fields – is the power of memory, place and emotions, as they embody the reality of an African American boy growing up during a critical turning point in Civil Rights history.”
Rembert’s art served as a form of emancipation, allowing him to reclaim his own narrative and share the stories of his community. He leaves behind a body of work that continues to inspire and educate people about the resilience and joy found in the face of historical struggles. Seen today, his work memorializes the atrocities of the past while compelling us to face the structural legacies of slavery that exist in the present. Yet this is only one end of a vibrant spectrum in his work, in which cheerful teenagers find freedom at a local watering hole, adults find love and faith in jazz clubs and churches – and a community is strengthened around myriad shared experiences, all of which are vividly memorialized in Rembert’s art.
