Winfred Rembert: Amazing Grace - Images on Leather at the Hudson River Museum. The work of Winfred Rembert, a self-taught artist, who documents his life and the tumultuous moments of the American Civil Rights Movement, was on view at the Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, January through May of 2012. In more than 50 works on hand-tooled leather stretched, stained, and etched, Rembert constructs scenes from the rural Southern town where he was born and raised, and peoples it with characters working the fields, joyous at church meetings, and enjoying its pool hall, jazz club, and café. His images are alive with figures and color, and dense with pattern. Some, more somber, convey the strife and grief of his own experiences of a near lynching and prison life. Growing up in 1950s rural Georgia, Rembert did backbreaking labor in the cotton fields. A young man, he was arrested during a 1960s civil rights march, and survived a near lynching. As a prisoner serving an unjust seven-year sentence, he learned to make patterns and design on leather by watching a fellow inmate create tooled leather wallets. Years later, adding color on tanned leather, Rembert conjured a world of incredible brutality and close personal ties existing in discomforting proximity. The exhibition's riveting themes include the Cotton Field series, where cotton balls snake relentlessly through rows of toiling field hands. Rembert said, "Curved [cotton] rows make a beautiful pattern. But as soon as you start picking, you forget how good it looks and think how hard it is. There just isn't anything you can say about cotton that is good".