WINFRED REMBERT: AMAZING GRACE
Introduction
A native of Cuthbert, Georgia, Winfred Rembert (b. 1945) grew up in the 1950s rural south just before the Civil Rights struggle achieved its full voice. Brought up by his great-aunt (“Mama”), many of Rembert’s works are inspired by memories of his childhood, when he worked at backbreaking labor in the cotton fields. He was arrested after a 1960s civil-rights march and survived a near-lynching before serving seven years in jail.
It was while he was in jail that he observed a fellow inmate create tooled leather wallets. There, Rembert learned the craft of hand-tooled leather to create unique patterns and design. Watching leather change from animal skin into a man’s belt, Rembert began to build his ideas about art, etching his recollections into leather that he washed with color. Years later, at the suggestion of his wife Patsy, Rembert began developing narratives and the stories of his youth into colourful tableaux on sheets of tanned leather that conjured a vanished world where both brutality and close community ties existed in discomforting proximity.
The leather craft that Winfred Rembert practices is drenched with a symbolism not found on ordinary canvas. The very act of cutting and carving flesh into pattern recalls the violence that permeated his life. Rembert, though, transcends pain to give us a tangible record of his experiences and the people he knows and painstakingly individualizes, even those that crowd his scenes of juke joints and chain gangs. “I’m trying to make these guys look like who they really were,” says Rembert. “I may not remember their names, but I got their faces.”
The exhibition Winfred Rembert: Amazing Grace and its accompanying catalogue have been made possible by a generous grant from the Mr. and Mrs. Raymond J. Horowitz Foundation for the Arts, Inc.
Memories of Cuthbert, Georgia
Winfred Rembert was born in 1945 in Cuthbert, Georgia, a small railroad town located in Southwest Georgia’s Randolph County. In Souls of Black Folk (1903), W.E.B. Du Bois wrote one of the first descriptions of this region that was once at the center of the deep South’s plantation economy: “How curious a land is this, — how full of untold story, of tragedy and laughter, and rich legacy of human life; shadowed with a tragic past, and rich with future promise! This is the Georgia Black Belt.” Today, over a century later, Rembert’s redemptive works of art mirror this rich legacy of human life and provide a graphic context for the civil-rights movement.
— Irma Watkins-Owens and Clifton Watson
Cotton Fields
For at least half of the 20th century, school officials shortened the academic year to ensure that black school children would work until the cotton harvest was complete. While by most standards Winfred would have a short and contentious tenure in Cuthbert’s cotton fields, he was summoned to work at the ripe age of six when most children begin school . “They looked at me,” he recalled, “and said ‘ain’t no need for him to be in school, look like he’ll make a good worker’.” During the time he worked in the fields alongside his family, Rembert attended school “maybe two days a week.”
— Irma Watkins-Owens and Clifton Watson
Chain Gang
Rembert’s six-year stint on the chain gang — the critical moment of his life and work — redefines the “now” and tethers him to earlier generations of African Americans.
Rembert’s All Me II portrays tightly compressed prisoners in claustrophobic space that ironically also seems to be unbounded. His repetitive characters are limitless as they extend beyond the edges of the work. We sense many are coming forward from all directions pressing in on the central figures. They come to bear witness to the long painful history of the chain gang and to those whose suffering we can neither see nor hear. The palpable pressure created and the internal tension are expressions of the violence and horror that shrouds this work.
Thus his depictions of the chain gang, which very easily and justifiably could have been shrill and angry, are modulated. They seductively engage the viewer, walking us back and asking us to look, to linger, and to reflect. This is the special perspective of his work to quietly get us to confront the horrors of the chain gang without shouting in our ears.
— Roger Panetta
Violence
... in this triptych, the most harrowing of his works, which deal with a lynching Rembert witnessed as a child and his own experience with a near-lynching, pattern and repetition form a background of formal cohesivesness and provides connective tissue to his work, helping to focus his artistic endeavor. In his ambitious The Lynching; After the Lynching; The Burial, the row of cabins and the hanging bodies, call to mind Billie Holliday’s haunting musical recording of Strange Fruit:
Southern trees bear a strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black body swinging in the Southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.
Using repeating patterns in both the first and second panels, Rembert’s trees form natural crucifixes that evoke Christ’s crucifixion. The simplified forms of his figures add to the tragic power of the composition, which recalls many early Renaissance works of crucifixion or lamentation, such as The Crucifixon of Christ (The Kaufman Crucifixon).
— Bartholomew F. Bland
Spirit
Rembert’s strongly religious upbringing plays a definitive role in shaping his art, and The Baptism plants its converts firmly in water that is reminiscent of the seas of cotton shown in other paintings. Here, women’s heads are covered, while men’s are exposed, and all join the company of the saved. The archetypal figure in white on the bottom right in Christ-like pose is vividly reminiscent of the central figure in white in Francisco Goya’s The Third of May 1808. In Saved and Saintified, frenetically styled figures all point their clasped hands in a same direction, leading the viewer’s eye directly to the altar. Technicolor clothing further punctuates the canvas and the parishioners form repetitive visual points as they curve their arms upward in joy. The four men at the altar are in stylized positions, and overall, there is a feeling of liveliness, hopefulness, and great activity.
In Queen Bee and the Blues, Rembert uses dramatic patterning in the blue-and-black tile floor and in the blue brick wall. Similar tile patterning appears in Sugar Cane (Patsy’s Mother), acting as a decorative foil for the figure in the foreground, where his enthusiasm for pattern becomes the dominant element of the painting , a penchant that can perhaps be traced to his artistic career begun in prison making utilitarian objects such as belts and wallets with a high degree of pattern on them, which was essential to the form. In Queen Bee and the Blues, he contrasts the rigid geometry of the wall pattern with the sinuous line of the singers and the microphones and the curves of the double bass reflect the Cyma curve of the female form next to it. In a kind of verbal pun, blue becomes the predominant color inQueen Bee and the Blues. Blue, in fact, is a running repetition in some of the social paintings: Strong blue tonalities appear in James Brownproviding the background.
— Bartholomew F. Bland
Family
We “still live like southerners,” he says, as he describes his family life. “We have breakfast, lunch and, supper together as a family.” Rembert passionately recounts, “I started telling stories as soon as the children “got old enough.” It is no coincidence that he and his family have persevered through tough times, that his son “Junior” displayed remarkable courage and conviction in a moment of crisis, nor that he and Patsy are seen as the “parents” of the neighborhood.
— Irma Watkins-Owens and Clifton Watson
A native of Cuthbert, Georgia, Winfred Rembert (b. 1945) grew up in the 1950s rural south just before the Civil Rights struggle achieved its full voice. Brought up by his great-aunt (“Mama”), many of Rembert’s works are inspired by memories of his childhood, when he worked at backbreaking labor in the cotton fields. He was arrested after a 1960s civil-rights march and survived a near-lynching before serving seven years in jail.
It was while he was in jail that he observed a fellow inmate create tooled leather wallets. There, Rembert learned the craft of hand-tooled leather to create unique patterns and design. Watching leather change from animal skin into a man’s belt, Rembert began to build his ideas about art, etching his recollections into leather that he washed with color. Years later, at the suggestion of his wife Patsy, Rembert began developing narratives and the stories of his youth into colourful tableaux on sheets of tanned leather that conjured a vanished world where both brutality and close community ties existed in discomforting proximity.
The leather craft that Winfred Rembert practices is drenched with a symbolism not found on ordinary canvas. The very act of cutting and carving flesh into pattern recalls the violence that permeated his life. Rembert, though, transcends pain to give us a tangible record of his experiences and the people he knows and painstakingly individualizes, even those that crowd his scenes of juke joints and chain gangs. “I’m trying to make these guys look like who they really were,” says Rembert. “I may not remember their names, but I got their faces.”
The exhibition Winfred Rembert: Amazing Grace and its accompanying catalogue have been made possible by a generous grant from the Mr. and Mrs. Raymond J. Horowitz Foundation for the Arts, Inc.
Memories of Cuthbert, Georgia
Winfred Rembert was born in 1945 in Cuthbert, Georgia, a small railroad town located in Southwest Georgia’s Randolph County. In Souls of Black Folk (1903), W.E.B. Du Bois wrote one of the first descriptions of this region that was once at the center of the deep South’s plantation economy: “How curious a land is this, — how full of untold story, of tragedy and laughter, and rich legacy of human life; shadowed with a tragic past, and rich with future promise! This is the Georgia Black Belt.” Today, over a century later, Rembert’s redemptive works of art mirror this rich legacy of human life and provide a graphic context for the civil-rights movement.
— Irma Watkins-Owens and Clifton Watson
Cotton Fields
For at least half of the 20th century, school officials shortened the academic year to ensure that black school children would work until the cotton harvest was complete. While by most standards Winfred would have a short and contentious tenure in Cuthbert’s cotton fields, he was summoned to work at the ripe age of six when most children begin school . “They looked at me,” he recalled, “and said ‘ain’t no need for him to be in school, look like he’ll make a good worker’.” During the time he worked in the fields alongside his family, Rembert attended school “maybe two days a week.”
— Irma Watkins-Owens and Clifton Watson
Chain Gang
Rembert’s six-year stint on the chain gang — the critical moment of his life and work — redefines the “now” and tethers him to earlier generations of African Americans.
Rembert’s All Me II portrays tightly compressed prisoners in claustrophobic space that ironically also seems to be unbounded. His repetitive characters are limitless as they extend beyond the edges of the work. We sense many are coming forward from all directions pressing in on the central figures. They come to bear witness to the long painful history of the chain gang and to those whose suffering we can neither see nor hear. The palpable pressure created and the internal tension are expressions of the violence and horror that shrouds this work.
Thus his depictions of the chain gang, which very easily and justifiably could have been shrill and angry, are modulated. They seductively engage the viewer, walking us back and asking us to look, to linger, and to reflect. This is the special perspective of his work to quietly get us to confront the horrors of the chain gang without shouting in our ears.
— Roger Panetta
Violence
... in this triptych, the most harrowing of his works, which deal with a lynching Rembert witnessed as a child and his own experience with a near-lynching, pattern and repetition form a background of formal cohesivesness and provides connective tissue to his work, helping to focus his artistic endeavor. In his ambitious The Lynching; After the Lynching; The Burial, the row of cabins and the hanging bodies, call to mind Billie Holliday’s haunting musical recording of Strange Fruit:
Southern trees bear a strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black body swinging in the Southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.
Using repeating patterns in both the first and second panels, Rembert’s trees form natural crucifixes that evoke Christ’s crucifixion. The simplified forms of his figures add to the tragic power of the composition, which recalls many early Renaissance works of crucifixion or lamentation, such as The Crucifixon of Christ (The Kaufman Crucifixon).
— Bartholomew F. Bland
Spirit
Rembert’s strongly religious upbringing plays a definitive role in shaping his art, and The Baptism plants its converts firmly in water that is reminiscent of the seas of cotton shown in other paintings. Here, women’s heads are covered, while men’s are exposed, and all join the company of the saved. The archetypal figure in white on the bottom right in Christ-like pose is vividly reminiscent of the central figure in white in Francisco Goya’s The Third of May 1808. In Saved and Saintified, frenetically styled figures all point their clasped hands in a same direction, leading the viewer’s eye directly to the altar. Technicolor clothing further punctuates the canvas and the parishioners form repetitive visual points as they curve their arms upward in joy. The four men at the altar are in stylized positions, and overall, there is a feeling of liveliness, hopefulness, and great activity.
In Queen Bee and the Blues, Rembert uses dramatic patterning in the blue-and-black tile floor and in the blue brick wall. Similar tile patterning appears in Sugar Cane (Patsy’s Mother), acting as a decorative foil for the figure in the foreground, where his enthusiasm for pattern becomes the dominant element of the painting , a penchant that can perhaps be traced to his artistic career begun in prison making utilitarian objects such as belts and wallets with a high degree of pattern on them, which was essential to the form. In Queen Bee and the Blues, he contrasts the rigid geometry of the wall pattern with the sinuous line of the singers and the microphones and the curves of the double bass reflect the Cyma curve of the female form next to it. In a kind of verbal pun, blue becomes the predominant color inQueen Bee and the Blues. Blue, in fact, is a running repetition in some of the social paintings: Strong blue tonalities appear in James Brownproviding the background.
— Bartholomew F. Bland
Family
We “still live like southerners,” he says, as he describes his family life. “We have breakfast, lunch and, supper together as a family.” Rembert passionately recounts, “I started telling stories as soon as the children “got old enough.” It is no coincidence that he and his family have persevered through tough times, that his son “Junior” displayed remarkable courage and conviction in a moment of crisis, nor that he and Patsy are seen as the “parents” of the neighborhood.
— Irma Watkins-Owens and Clifton Watson