Winfred Rembert (American, 1945-2021)
“A Cottonfield Carry All” (“story bag”)
Dye on carved and tooled leather
17 x 14 x 5 in. (43 x 35.5 x 12.7 cm.)
Signed “Winfred Rembert” on each side
– Provenance: 2011 Hamptons “Take 2” Documentary Film Festival show.
This bag was featured on the artist’s website. He mainly did these for his wife.
Born and raised in Georgia, Winfred Rembert grew up in the cotton fields, working for fifty cents a day, and was arrested in 1965, at 20 years old, during a civil rights demonstration. He survived a near-lynching before being sent to work on a chain gang for seven years. He began learning leather tooling in prison, a technique he used years later to create unique powerful autobiographical paintings depicting the day-to-day existence of African Americans in the segregated South. His works are now held in major museums throughout the country: the National Gallery of Art (Washington D.C.), Cleveland Museum of Art, Georgia Museum of Art, High Museum of Art (Atlanta), Minneapolis Institute of Art, Yale University Art Gallery, among others. The self-taught artist posthumously won the Pulitzer Prize in 2022 for his memoir "Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist’s Memoir of the Jim Crow South", co-authored with Erin I. Kelly.
Teaser: “All Me: The Life and Times of Winfred Rembert” (available on Amazon.com):