04/04/2021
We were so saddened with the news that Winfred Rembert passed away on Wednesday March 31, 2021. It was a pleasure to work with such a talented and incredible man with a life and story like no other, which will now live on through his paintings!
From the article :
"Winfred Rembert survived a near-lynching in rural Georgia in 1967. Just 21, he had been stripped of his clothes by a mob of white men and hoisted upside down from a tree, a noose around his ankles. One man came at him with a knife and nearly castrated him, sending blood gushing down his body.
The only reason he wasn’t killed was that another white man stepped in, saying there were better things that could be done with Mr. Rembert, like throwing him back in jail from which he had just escaped.
After seven years of incarceration and hard labor for stealing a car, taking a gun from a deputy sheriff and escaping from prison, Mr. Rembert was released. He married, moved north and had eight children. And in a turn of events that no one had expected, he became an artist of some renown: Carving figures into leather, a craft he had learned in prison, he recreated vivid scenes from his life, of picking cotton, being lynched and busting rocks in his prison stripes.
His art told the story of the Jim Crow South. It was exhibited in galleries and museums and helped support his family, though they lived in poverty.
Mr. Rembert died at 75 on Wednesday at his home in New Haven, Conn. His son Winfred Jr. said that the precise cause of death was not known, but that his father had struggled with diabetes, kidney disease and hypertension.
Near-lynchings were not uncommon, Bryan Stevenson, a Black lawyer who inspired the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, a museum about slavery and a memorial to lynching victims in Montgomery, Ala., said in a phone interview. What was unusual in Mr. Rembert’s case was that he talked about it, providing a rare account of a lynching in the late 1960s in the American South.
“Most people don’t ever feel secure enough to talk about this, although we’re hearing more of these stories now,” said Mr. Stevenson, who founded the Equal Justice Initiative, a legal advocacy group that
