Winfred Rembert facts for kids

Winfred Rembert (born 1945, died 2021) was an amazing African-American artist. He created unique artworks using special hand-tools and shoe dye on leather. His art often showed scenes from his life and the difficult times he experienced growing up in the American South.

Winfred Rembert's Early Years

Winfred Rembert was born on November 22, 1945. This was in Cuthbert, Randolph County, Georgia. His aunt raised him. He worked in the cotton fields, earning very little money, sometimes just twenty cents a day.

Because of his work, he missed school two days a week. He could not read or write until he was in high school. When he was 16, he stopped going to school. This was because of growing racial tensions in his area. Life was very hard for Black people at that time.

Winfred Rembert's Art and Life

How Rembert Became an Artist

In the 1960s, Winfred Rembert was arrested during a civil rights march. He was not charged with any crime. He spent seven years on a chain gang, which was a group of prisoners forced to do hard labor. During this time, he faced extreme danger and survived a terrible attack.

While in prison, he learned how to make wallets from tooled leather. He also learned to create designs on leather. This was the start of his unique art style. Rembert would stretch, tool, and dye leather. He used shoe dye to show scenes from the rural Jim Crow South. These were places where unfair laws separated Black and white people. As more bright colors of shoe dye became available, his art became even more vivid.

Exhibitions and Family Life

In April 2010, Rembert had his first solo art show. It was called Memories of My Youth. This show was at the Adelson Galleries in New York City. For most of his adult life, Rembert lived in New Haven, Connecticut. He lived there with his wife, Patsy, and their eight children. He was well-known in his neighborhood, Newhallville. People often called him "Pops."

Documentaries About Rembert

A special documentary film was made about his life. It was called All Me: The Life and Times of Winfred Rembert and came out in 2011. This film won many awards at different film festivals. It was also shown on television as part of the PBS series America ReFramed.

The film was shown at the Library of Congress and across the United States and Canada. Often, Rembert's paintings were displayed alongside the film. When he was healthy enough, Rembert would go with the film. He used these chances to speak to high school students and other audiences. His family often traveled with him.

Rembert was also featured in another documentary called Ashes to Ashes. This film honored people who were victims of terrible attacks in the South. It noted that Rembert was one of the very few known survivors of such an event. Ashes to Ashes premiered at the Mountainfilm Festival on May 24, 2019.

Awards and Legacy

Winfred Rembert received several important awards for his work. In 2015, the Equal Justice Initiative honored him. He also won a United States Artists Barr Fellowship in 2016.

In the last years of his life, he worked on a book. The book, Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist's Memoir of the Jim Crow South, was released in September 2021. This book tells Rembert's life story through talks and interviews with philosopher Erin I. Kelly. It won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Biography. A member of the Pulitzer Prize Committee said that Rembert's life story and art would be remembered forever.

Winfred Rembert passed away on March 31, 2021, at his home in New Haven. He was 75 years old. In his obituary in The New York Times, Katharine Q. Seelye wrote that Rembert turned "painful memories into art."