Winfred Rembert was born in 1945 in Americus, Georgia, during the Jim Crow era of the American South. Influenced by the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement as a teenager, Rembert attended a peaceful protest in 1965 and was attacked by white antagonists. He fled the assailants by stealing a car, leading to his arrest for theft. Rembert spent two years incarcerated while awaiting charges before escaping from jail in 1967. He was caught, placed in the trunk of a police car and released to an angry white mob. Surviving the ensuing lynching, Rembert was thrown in jail and 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. The harrowing experience would later prove central to the narrative of his extraordinary art.
Rembert learned how to tool and craft leather from a fellow prisoner, a technique he would use to share his story with the world. Following his release from prison in 1974, Rembert married Patsy Gammage and the couple eventually settled in New Haven, Connecticut where they raised a family. At the age of fifty-one, with his wife’s encouragement, Rembert began a full-time artistic practice. Combining his mastery of leather working with his skilled draftsmanship, he created an extraordinary body of autobiographical paintings chronicling Black life of the Jim Crow south through pictorial landscapes of cotton fields and Black neighborhoods, and rhythmic compositions featuring field workers, freedom marches, juke joints, and prison life.
Rembert’s works depicting the chain gangs are among his most powerful expressions. His textural tooling of the leather with brilliant and intuitive use of cadenced patterns and intense color conjure both human hardship and a sense of optimism for the future, identified by brave moments of good humor. Rembert continued to make art for nearly twenty-five years, before his death in 2021 at the age of seventy-five.
Rembert’s work is represented in numerous permanent collections across the country including Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; Legacy Museum, Equal Justice Initiative, Montgomery, AL; Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, Los Angeles, CA; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT; and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT.
Winfred Rembert was granted solo museum exhibitions at the Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, OH (2018); The Muskegon Museum of Arts, MI (2017); Catamount Arts, St. Johnsbury, VT (2015); New Haven Museum, CT (2015); Danforth Art Museum, Framingham, MA (2013); Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Montgomery, AL (2013); the Flint Institute of the Arts, Flint, MI (2013); the Citadelle Art Foundation, Canadian, TX (2012); the Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, NY (2012); Greenville County Museum of Art, Greenville, SC (2012); and alongside Hale Woodruff at Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT (2000).
In addition to his pictorial narratives in leather, Rembert recalled his life in an autobiography penned by Erin I. Kelly, "Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist’s Memoir of the Jim Crow South." Published in 2021, Rembert was posthumously awarded the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Biography.