In his foreword to Winfred Rembert’s memoirs, the Civil Rights attorney Bryan Stevenson notes that the artist’s stretched-leather canvases contain “love, strength, humor, and the power and complexity of the Black experience in America distilled into some of the most compelling art I’ve ever seen.” Rembert’s incised and dyed-leather images of Black life in the Jim Crow South – both its harrowing ordeals and centers of vibrant, joyous community – ensure that the past and all its richness cannot be erased.
Seven of Rembert’s paintings featured in Visions of America tell a mostly autobiographical history of African American life in the mid-20th-century southern United States. Rembert was denied a complete education in Georgia and was forced to pick cotton in a harsh sharecropping economy. He participated in the Civil Rights Movement. He survived an attempted lynching, only to be imprisoned for years of unimaginably brutal incarceration on a chain gang. Yet while his art is certainly concerned with such painful moments in American history, his work also depicts scenes of joy and immeasurable courage.
