Tuesday, January 18, 2022 – ALL ASPECTS OF THE BLACK EXPERIENCE IN ART

By admin

TUESDAY, JANUARY 18, 2022


574th Issue


Celebrating

Winfred Rembert, artist  

On Mama’s Cotton Sack, 2002

Winfred Rembert (1945-2021) was an artist from Cuthbert, Georgia who lived and worked in New Haven, CT. His artwork, painted on carved and tooled leather, displays memories of his youth—Black life in the Jim Crow South. His artistic vision calls forth vivid scenes from Georgia cotton fields and colorful characters from the juke joints and pool halls of Cuthbert. They also reveal his encounters with racial and police violence in the aftermath of a civil rights protest, and the seven years he spent on Georgia chain gangs. Rembert’s paintings, which have often been compared to the work of Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden, and Horace Pippen, have been exhibited at museums and galleries around the country, including the Hudson River Museum, the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, the Yale Art Gallery, and the Adelson Galleries in New York, and been featured in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Huffington Post, Vanity Fair, and Hyperallergic.

Rembert was honored by Bryan Stevenson’s Equal Justice Initiative in 2015, and in 2016 received a United States Artists Barr Fellowship. In November, 2019, NPR’s Morning Edition aired a powerful segment featuring Winfred and Patsy Rembert produced by StoryCorps.

Rembert is the subject of two award-winning documentary films: All Me: The Life and Times of Winfred Rembert (dir. Vivian Ducat, 2011) and the New Yorker documentary Ashes to Ashes(dir. Taylor Rees, 2019), about the legacy of lynching in America.

CHASING ME TO MY GRAVE: An Artist’s Memoir of the Jim Crow Southby Winfred Rembert, as told to Erin I. Kelly, with a foreword by Bryan Stevenson, is out September 7, 2021 with Bloomsbury. An excerpt from the memoir was published in The New Yorker here.

In 2021 Pomegranate launched a Winfred Rembert collection with a 1,000-piece Jigsaw Puzzle of The Dirty Spoon Cafe, published in association with The High Museum of Art, Atlanta, followed by a Boxed Notecard Set featuring four of Rembert’s paintings.

Photo credit: Renan Ozturk

Winfred’s Pool Room, 2007

Overseers in the Field #1, 2007

The Overseer, 2005

Dinner Time in the Cotton Field, 2001

Chain Gang – The Ditch, 2008

Saturday Shopping Day, 2000

Ben Shorter IV, 2010

Jeff’s Cafe 1997

Tuesday Photo of the Day

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MONDAY PHOTO OF THE DAY

Hara Reiser and Laura Hussey guessed correctly!

Text by Judith Berdy
Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS
Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website
Edited by Melanie Colter and Deborah Dorff

All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated

Carved and tooled on dyed leather, by Winfred Rembert
All artworks © 1995-2020, Winfred Rembert / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
All rights reserved.

FUNDING PROVIDED BY ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE GRANTS CITY COUNCIL REPRESENTATIVE BEN KALLOS DISCRETIONARY FUNDING THRU DYCD

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