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 South by 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