Hauser & Wirth

Winfred Rembert

The Estate of Winfred Rembert

Photo: Renan Ozturk

Winfred Rembert (1945 – 2021) was born in Americus, Georgia and grew up in nearby Cuthbert, a rural railroad town located in the southwest region of the state, once at the center of the Deep South’s plantation economy. Living in Cuthbert during the era of Jim Crow, Rembert was exposed at a young age to the exploitative practices of the sharecropping system. Spending much of his childhood alongside family members working in the fields, Rembert received a limited education. Despite the infrequency of his attendance, a dedicated teacher by the name of Miss Prather recognized Rembert’s artistic talent and encouraged him to express his creativity through drawing.

As a teenager, Rembert was deeply influenced by the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement in Americus, where his active participation led to confrontations with law enforcement. In 1965, while attending a peaceful protest which was attacked by white antagonists, he fled from the assailants in a stolen car and was subsequently arrested for the theft. In 1967, still incarcerated while awaiting charges, Rembert escaped from jail. Following his ensuing capture by an angry white mob, Rembert survived a near-lynching. For the next seven years of his life, he was transferred to multiple penitentiaries within the Georgia prison system, enduring taxing physical labor while working on various chain gangs—a harrowing experience that would later prove central to the narrative of his extraordinary art.

Rembert learned how to tool and craft leather from a fellow prisoner—the technique he would later use to share his story with the world. Following his release from prison in 1974, Rembert married Patsy Gammage; the couple eventually settled in New Haven, Connecticut, and raised a family there. At the age of fifty-one, with his wife’s encouragement, Rembert began a full-time artistic practice. Combining his mastery of leather working with his skilled draftsmanship, he built a unique body of autobiographical paintings and continued to make art for nearly twenty-five years, before his death on March 31, 2021, at the age of 75.

Over the course of his career, Rembert embraced a variety of styles and pictorial strategies. His works range from purely illustrative to extremely complex compositions that verge on abstraction. In many of the early paintings, the materiality of Rembert’s media is immediately apparent. In such works, he rendered his figures in muted tones to compliment the natural color of the leather backgrounds. In other works, bright-colored pigments cover the entire surface of densely packed compositions. Over time, Rembert’s compositions accrued as a chronicle of his life, through pictorial landscapes of cotton fields and rhythmic compositions of field workers, freedom marches, church services, juke joints, and chain gangs in the Jim Crow south. In its narrative and formal qualities, Rembert’s work, with its corporeal texture, intense color, powerful patterns, and depictions of both hardship and pleasure, takes its place among the oeuvres of the most influential American figurative masters.

The York Square Cinema in New Haven launched a solo exhibition of Rembert’s leather paintings in 1998. Exhibitions followed at the Yale University Art Gallery and in New York, Atlanta, Los Angeles, among other locales and, in 2012, the artist received his first major solo museum presentation: ‘Amazing Grace’ debuted at the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers, New York, before travelling to four additional venues. This survey included more than fifty works and incorporated historical photographs of Georgia, as well as gospel music recorded and performed in the Museum’s galleries by Rembert. ‘Amazing Grace’ also showcased the feature-length documentary ‘All Me: The Life and Times of Winfred Rembert’ (2011), produced and directed by Vivian Ducat. When reminiscing on the title of the exhibition, the artist stated, ‘Amazing Grace is one of the songs I remember that was sung in the fields. I just loved to listen to the singing. Singing was the only thing about the fields that I loved.’

Winfred Rembert’s work is represented in the permanent collections of Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX; Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; Flint Institute of the Arts, Flint, MI; Florence Griswold Museum, Old Lyme, CT; Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia, Athens, GA; Glenstone, Potomac, MD; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH; Legacy Museum, Equal Justice Initiative, Montgomery, AL; Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, NY; Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, Los Angeles, CA; Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, WI; Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, MN; Muskegon Museum of Art, Youngstown, OH; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Richard M. Ross Museum of Art, Wesleyan University, Delaware, OH; Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT; and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT. Rembert’s work was highlighted in major exhibitions at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Montgomery, AL in 2013; the Flint Institute of the Arts, Flint, MI in 2013; the Citadelle Art Foundation, Canadian, Texas in 2012; the Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, NY in 2012; the Greenville County Museum of Art, Greenville, SC in 2012; and the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT in 2000.

The artist’s memoir ‘Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist’s Memoir of the Jim Crow South’ (with Erin I. Kelly, Bloomsbury, 2021) was awarded a posthumous Pulitzer Prize in 2022.

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Selected Artworks

Dinnertime in the Cotton Field

2011

Soda Shop

2007

Baptism

2000

Mass Workers (Chain Gang)

2012

Caint to Caint II

2016

All of Me

Jeff’s Pool Room

2003

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Biography

Print

Born

Americus GA, 1945

Education

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Solo Exhibitions

2024

Hauser & Wirth, 'Winfred Rembert. Hard Times', Los Angeles CA

2023

Hauser & Wirth, 'Winfred Rembert. All of Me', New York NY

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Selected Group Exhibitions

2024

Galerie Marguo, 'Wronged', Paris, France

2023

Southampton Arts Center, 'Change Agents. Women Collectors Shaping the Art World', Southampton NY

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Awards and Grants

2022

Mary Lynn Kotz Award for Art in Literature Pulitzer Prize winner for Biography/Autobiography

2016

United States Artists Barr Fellowship

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Bibliography

Monographs

2021

'Winfred & Mitchell Rembert: Father and Son', New York: Adelson Galleries, 2021

2012

'Winfred Rembert: Amazing Grace', Yonkers,: Hudson River Museum, 2012, ill. (exh. cat.)

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Artist's Books, Writings

2021

Rembert, Winfred, Kelly, Erin I., Stevenson, Bryan, 'Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist’s Memoir of the Jim Crow South', New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021, ill.

Press

2025

Lieberman, Lynn, ''Winfred Rembert: Refuge' at Fort Gansevoort', on: gothamtogo.com, 25 May 2025, ill.

2024

DiTillio, Jessi, 'Winfred Rembert' [review], on: artforum.com, 19 July 2024, ill.
___, '"Winfred Rembert. Hard Times" Recognizes the Late Great American Artist', on: juxtapoz.com, 8 July 2024, ill.
Dixon, Carole, 'Los Angeles art exhibitions: the best shows to see in July', on: wallpaper.com, 29 June 2024, ill.
Araya, Estelle, 'PICK OF THE WEEK: Winfred Rembert', on: artillerymag.com, 27 June 2024, ill.

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Audiovisuals

2019

’Ashes to Ashes’, directed by Taylor Rees and Renan Ozturk, documentary, May 24.

2011

’All Me: The Life and Times of Winfred Rembert’, directed by Vivian Ducat, documentary, October 13.

Exhibitions

Films

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Patsy Rembert on Winfred Rembert

Artists Respond: Kate Capshaw, Russell Craig & Amy Sherald on Winfred Rembert

Events

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