The Life and Art of Winfred Rembert, a Black History Month Program via Zoom

A conversation between Erin Kelly, who co-wrote the memoir Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist's Memoir of the Jim Crow South by the late Winfred Rembert, and Rembert's wife and daughter, Patsy and Lillian Rembert. This book, published in September 2021, vividly tells, through Rembert's words and images, the story of his life. It was named one of the best books of the year by NPR, Publisher's Weekly and BookPage.

This program is co-sponsored by the Stamford NAACP.

Registration required here. The registration confirmation email will include a link to join the webinar at the scheduled time.

Winfred Rembert (1945-2021) was an artist from Cuthbert, Georgia, who lived and worked in New Haven. His artwork, painted on carved and tooled leather, displays memories of his youth in the Jim Crow South. His artistic vision calls forth vivid scenes from Georgia's cotton fields, and colorful characters from the juke joints and pool halls of Cuthbert. They also reveal his encounters with racial and police violence in the aftermath of a civil rights protest, and the seven years he spent on Georgia chain gangs. Rembert’s paintings, often  compared to the work of Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden, and Horace Pippin, have been exhibited around the country, including the Hudson River Museum, the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, the Yale Art Gallery, and the Adelson Galleries in New York, and been featured in The New York Times, Boston Globe, Huffington Post, Vanity Fair and Hyperallergic.

Rembert was honored by Bryan Stevenson’s Equal Justice Initiative in 2015, and in 2016 he received a United States Artists Barr Fellowship. He was the subject of two award-winning documentaries: All Me: The Life and Times of Winfred Rembert and  Ashes to Ashes, about the legacy of lynching in America.

For more about Rembert, read this feature profile that ran soon after the publication of his memoir.