December 19, 2024
Winfred Rembert was born in 1945 in Americus, Georgia. Painted on carved and tooled leather, his art displays memories of the Artist’s youth and Black life in the Jim Crow South.
In the Pulitzer Prize winning autobiography Chasing me to my Grave: An Artist’s Memoir of the Jim Crow South, Winfred Rembert recalls running away from home as a young teenager. He left his great-aunt, “Mama,” and the cotton fields for Hamilton Avenue, an area of downtown Cuthbert, Georgia populated with Black-owned businesses. Winfred was young and alone, often sleeping in the cemetery which he says, “If you have nowhere to go and nowhere to sleep, sleeping on a headstone is a good sleep.”
Winfred made friends with a kid his age named “Duck” who introduced him to Jeff, the owner of Jeff’s Café & Pool Room and Zeb’s Shoe Shine down the street. Jeff took to Winfred right away and offered him work running the poolroom and a bed to sleep in. Despite the promise of work away from the hard labor of the cotton fields, Winfred describes the realities of life on Hamilton Avenue:
“Back on Hamilton Avenue, down the street from his pool hall, Jeff also owned a shoeshine parlor, which was very good. I used to go in there and shine…One Sunday morning this White man came in and kicked this Black guy all over the place…I carried that with me…I learned: stay in your place and you’re safer. You won’t get into trouble. I’d like to think some of the older guys should have helped him, but when you jump into something like that, you have to think about the aftermath…Would the White man go and get a lot more White Folks and come back and tear up the place?…White folks did whatever they wanted to do. People looked at you as if you were nothing.”
Witness to the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement as a teenager, Rembert attended a peaceful protest in 1965 and was attacked by White antagonists. He fled the assailants by stealing a car, leading to his arrest for theft. Rembert spent two years incarcerated while awaiting charges before escaping from jail in 1967. He was caught, placed in the trunk of a police car and released to an awaiting mob of White men. Surviving the near lynching, Rembert was thrown in jail for the next seven years of his life and was transferred to multiple penitentiaries within the Georgia prison system, enduring taxing physical labor while working on various chain gangs.
In 2011, Rembert was the subject of an award winning documentary film, All Me: The Life and Times of Winfred Rembert, by Vivian Ducat, and in 2015, he was honored by Bryan Stevenson’s Equal Justice Initiative. In November 2019, NPR aired a segment produced by StoryCorps about the Artist.
Twentieth Century Stories also presents paintings, works on paper, photography and sculpture by Ernie Barnes, Davis Cone, Philip Evergood, César Galicia, Gregory Gillespie, William Gropper, Chaim Gross, George Grosz, Käthe Kollwitz, Jack Levine, Louis Lozowick, Reginald Marsh, Anthony Mitri, Bernard Perlin, Ben Shahn, Raphael Soyer and Alfred Stieglitz. Each work is a compelling, humanist expression of subjects that include civil rights, the human toll of war, and the century’s industrial progress, public works, and entertainment that challenged the world and changed modern life.
For a preview of Twentieth Century Stories, you are invited to view our catalogue and visit our Online Viewing Room.
November 14, 2024 – January 4, 2025
475 Park Avenue at 57th Street
New York, NY 10022
(212) 355 – 4545
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Image credit: Winfred Rembert, Untitled (The Dirty Spoon Café), 2011, dye on carved and tooled leather, 10 9/16 x 15 5/8 inches; Forum Gallery.
