Hard Times

Working in his signature medium of carved and painted leather, late American artist Winfred Rembert (1945 – 2021) dedicated the last thirty years of his life to creating a striking visual memoir. The consistently powerful and original oeuvre he left behind is a testament to the improvisational skill, determination and resilience required of a visionary shaped by a lifetime of extreme adversity. In May, when Hauser & Wirth debuts the first–ever Los Angeles exhibition devoted to Rembert at its Downtown Arts District complex, West Coast audiences are finally offered the opportunity to experience his story, told with both beauty and brutality. The exhibition presents two of the artist’s foundational series—the Cotton Field and Chain Gang paintings. These collections encapsulate two harrowing but formative chapters in Rembert’s life, reflecting his upbringing on a sharecropping field and his labor on a prison chain gang in the American South during Jim Crow. At once figural and abstract, Rembert’s compositions, vibrant color blocks and corporeal texture introduce the radical potential of tooled leather. Accompanying the exhibition is a presentation of love letters written between Rembert and his wife Patsy, who was instrumental in his survival of trauma and subsequent development as an artist. Their incredible exchange, shared here with the public for the first time, documents their affection and hope which grew while Rembert was incarcerated from 1965 to 1974. Winfred Rembert (1945 – 2021) was born in Americus, Georgia and grew up in nearby Cuthbert, a rural railroad town located in the southwest region of the state, once at the center of the Deep South’s plantation economy. Living in Cuthbert during the era of Jim Crow, Rembert was exposed at a young age to the exploitative practices of the sharecropping system. Spending much of his childhood alongside family members working in the fields, Rembert received a limited education. Despite the infrequency of his attendance, a dedicated teacher by the name of Miss Prather recognized Rembert’s artistic talent and encouraged him to express his creativity through drawing. Winfred Rembert’s work is represented in the permanent collections of Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX; Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; Flint Institute of the Arts, Flint, MI; Florence Griswold Museum, Old Lyme, CT; Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia, Athens, GA; Glenstone, Potomac, MD; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH; Legacy Museum, Equal Justice Initiative, Montgomery, AL; Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, NY; Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, Los Angeles, CA; Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, WI; Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, MN; Muskegon Museum of Art, Youngstown, OH; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Richard M. Ross Museum of Art, Wesleyan University, Delaware, OH; Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT; and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT. Rembert’s work was highlighted in major exhibitions at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Montgomery, AL in 2013; the Flint Institute of the Arts, Flint, MI in 2013; the Citadelle Art Foundation, Canadian, Texas in 2012; the Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, NY in 2012; the Greenville County Museum of Art, Greenville, SC in 2012; and the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT in 2000. The artist’s memoir ‘Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist’s Memoir of the Jim Crow South’ (with Erin I. Kelly, Bloomsbury, 2021) was awarded a posthumous Pulitzer Prize in 2022.

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