Melissa Bailey Photo
Winfred Rembert at work in his Newhall Street home.
WInfred Rembert
“Cotton Field Rows,” 2009.
Winfred Rembert, a nationally renowned artist who depicted vivid scenes of Southern cotton fields and chain gangs and juke joints, died Wednesday inside the Newhall Street home where he carved his leather masterpieces.
He was 75.
And he was a New Haven treasure, an irrepressible man of many talents (including a soulful singing voice) who was impossible not to love.
He died as a result of a long-term illness, at home by the side of his beloved wife Patsy, as he had wished, according to his daughter Lillian.
“He was a gem to us. He was a great man, very humble, and kind. He was loved in this community,” said Newhallville Alder Delphine Clyburn, a neighbor who was close to the family.
The son of field laborers, Rembert grew up in the segregated South in the 1940s and ‘50s, in rural Georgia. He worked in cotton fields, survived a near-lynching, and served seven years on a chain gang.
He survived a lynching, a story he recounts in the above video.
A story posted Tuesday on WNPR’s website, about a documentary that includes Rembert’s story, summarizes what happened this way:
At a demonstration in Americus, Georgia, he was arrested and put in jail without being charged, he said.
Rembert was there for a year, when — in 1967 — he managed to break out of his cell by stuffing up a toilet with a roll of paper and causing a flood. But he was caught, he says in the film, and thrown into the trunk of a car.
“About a 30-minute ride,” Rembert says. “They opened up the trunk. I saw these ropes hanging from a tree. Nooses. A place designed that looked like to hang people.”
Rembert goes on to describe how the men put a rope around his feet and hung him upside down from the tree. Then a deputy sheriff came at him with a knife.
“And he grab my private parts,” Rembert says. “And he took his knife and he stuck me. They was going to castrate me, hang me and burn me. I was 19 years old. There I am like a pig hanging up in a tree, ready to be slaughtered.”
But the crowd of men didn’t kill Rembert. Instead he was taken down from the tree and “made an example,” Rembert says. They put him in jail and on a chain gang until 1974.
Serving on the chain gang, Rembert took notice of a 16-year-old girl who attended a nearby school. He tried to talk to her. No luck.
So one day he piled dirt in front of her school bus, daughter Lillian recounted in a conversation Wednesday evening.
The driver told the girl, who was named Patsy, “You better talk to him, Or he will keep piling dirt in front of us.”
A lifelong love was born.
Also in prison, a man named TJ taught Rembert how to carve wallets out of leather. A passion, and a craft, were born. Though it would take decades to manifest.
Winfred Rembert
“Leaning On The Everlasting Arm,” 2007.
After Rembert’s release from prison, he and Patsy joined the second great migration of Black Southerners up north. He worked as a longshoreman and handyman, among other jobs.
He and Patsy settled in New Haven.
In a home on Newhall Street, with Patsy’s encouragement, Rembert began in his 50s to draw and paint scenes from his youth. Then he picked up the leather-carving craft TJ had taught him in prison.
He spent endless hours recreating pictures from his memory, of church services, cotton fields, prison. He developed a painstaking method, drawing from 100 hand tools to produce bright, vivid, colorful scenes. He would wet cow hide, cut into it with an ivory-tipped blade, then soften the edges with a bevel, a matting tool, and a “spoon.” He finished by dying the leather, and applying a protective sheen. The colors were bright, the scenes active and vivid. In the above video, he demonstrated the approach.
One day Jock Reynolds of the Yale University Art Gallery stumbled upon Rembert’s work, recognized its brilliance, and arranged for his first exhibition in 2000.
Melissa Bailey Photo
I happened to meet Rembert around the same time. I was researching a story about a slumlord who had used money stolen from a community agency to buy properties in low-income neighborhoods. I knocked on the door of one of those homes. Rembert answered. The home seemed to be falling apart around him, as he sat at a table surrounded by his stunning artwork. He told me how the landlord (whom he said he loved) took him on a trip back south to Georgia and paid for all his art supplies. He told me his life story, patiently drawing each scene in words just as he patiently carved his scenes in leather. He invited me back that night with my then-young daughters, whom he treated to a demonstration of his work and a gift of two pendants.
Every time I ran into Rembert in years to come, he remained the same self-effacing, warm man who met me that first day. He burst into a grin and stopped to talk, as though he had an infinite reservoir of time. And he never left Newhallville, even as the nation discovered his talents and he began making a fraction of the money long owed him.
Rembert had the first big break of his career in 2010, when New York City’s Adelson Galleries exhibited 45 pieces of his work. Pieces in that show sold for $12,000 to $35,000 each and put Rembert on the national scene. A 2011 documentary called All Me: The Life and Times of Winfred Rembert told the story of his life; it won a silver plaque in the Chicago International Film Festival.
In 2012 he had exhibitions and screenings and public appearances in Harlem, the Hudson River Valley, in Atlanta, Montgomery, and L.A. He made a presentation at the Library of Congress in the nation’s capital. Click here to a story about that by Melissa Bailey, who accompanied him on one trip.
It was only after the world discovered Winfred Rembert and invited him to address audiences that a New Haven public school did the same. Click here to read about his first visit to a city public school, Coop High, in 2012, where he urged students to avoid the n‑word.
In 2015, New Haven Museum staged an exhibition of his work. (Read about that here.)
Once his fame began spreading, Rembert returned to Cuthbert, Georgia, the scene of his youthful traumas, to receive a proclamation from the mayor, who declared Sept. 18 “Winfred Rembert Day.”
“I left home in chains to the chain gang,” he subsequently told the Independent’s Melissa Bailey. “But I’m coming home as somebody.”
He visited the house where he used to cut grass as a kid, “when I couldn’t come in the front door.” This time, Rembert was invited upstairs to sleep in a suite there for an entire week. He also visited the plantation where he and his mother used to pick cotton for 1 cent per pound. The fields are no longer used for crops. The home he lived in as a baby is now owned by a white couple, who use it as a summer house. Rembert said the couple, newlyweds, invited him and his six sons into the home for a huge country breakfast of ham and grits.
“It was breakfast for a king,” Rembert recalled. “To have a white woman cooking breakfast for a black man,” he added, is a very unusual thing where he came from.
Rembert said at the time he learned a lesson from his newfound fame.
“When people think you’re somebody in this world,” they’ll give you everything. But “when you’re down and out,” they won’t give you a dime.
“It’s backwards,” he said.
Rembert suffered for years from diabetes, stress, and other debilitating illnesses. During his final months, Patsy “never left his side” and enabled him to remain home, which was his wish, according to Lillian.
“Chain Gang,” 2004.
Rembert is survived by his beloved wife and lifelong partner Patsy; two daughters, Lillian and Nancy; sons Winfred Jr., John Thomas, Mitchell, Patrick, Robby, and Justin; and numerous beloved grandchildren. He was predeceased by his son Edgar.
Funeral arrangements have not yet been set. Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist’s Memoir of the Jim Crow South, which Rembert authored, is scheduled to be released on Aug. 10, 2021.
Portions of this article originally appeared in previous Independent articles by Melissa Bailey and Ariela Martin.
What a beautiful man; what a tragic loss. The agony he experienced is that of so many. This history lives on through his art and his story . May we all strive for better in his honor. Thank you Rembert. My tears for his family.