Winfred Rembert

Biography

Georgia native Winfred Rembert spent his childhood as a fieldworker in the pre-Civil Rights South, joined the movement as a teenager, was forced to work on a prison chain gang and is a rare survivor of a lynching attempt. As a self-taught visual artist, he depicts scenes from the days of segregation in intricate painted works of leather tooling. Though he has endured profound pain, his acclaimed art, which is represented in a number of public and private collections, focuses on positive aspects of black life in the 1950s. He is the subject of Ashes to Ashes (Mountainfilm 2019).