Winfred Rembert

Miss Prather's Class, 2014

Color Reduction Wood Cut, 4 blocks with 4 silk screen colors, embossing
on white rives BKF paper

Edition 17/30

15.80h x 12w inches

Framed

Winfred Rembert

Winfred Rembert was born in 1945 in rural Americus, Georgia, and grew up in nearby Cuthbert, where cotton and peanut farming were the toil of living. After working in the fields since early childhood, being arrested during a civil rights demonstration, surviving a near-lynching and serving 7 years in prison, Rembert got married to his beloved Patsy and moved to Connecticut in 1975 where they raised eight children. Rembert began to make his colorful tooled and dyed leather works at the age of 52 to visualize his memories and tell the stories of his youth. He has since become a highly lauded self-taught artist with major museum exhibitions, including Yale University and the Hudson River Museum.

A feature-length documentary, All Me: The Life and Times of Winfred Rembert, was released in 2011. Produced and directed by Vivian Ducat, the documentary has been presented in festivals and museums across the US and Canada and aired on PBS, and has won numerous prestigious film awards.

Rembert is a gentle, gracious, out-going and big-hearted man with an easy smile. He likes to sing and tell his stories. His carved and colorful pictures show us a time (from not so long ago) of rural poverty in the segregated south and his memories of picking cotton and planting peanuts, singing in church and dancing in juke joints, and of cafes and pool halls, prison and chain gangs.

However, it is not just the stories that make Rembert's pictures so compelling; it is their explicit expressiveness, rhythmic lines, bold compositions, pattern and repetition, and brilliant color that makes them such visually spectacular works of art. Although totally self-taught, his art is often compared to African-American masters such as Horace Pippin, Romare Bearden and Jacob Lawrence.

Rembert remembers and depicts the hard and harsh times of his past, however his pictures are full of life and joyous vibrancy; they portray and represent the indelible human spirit of enduring while looking toward something better.