As Winfred Rembert recalled: “Chain gang work is the worst work under the sun. I know because I spent seven years on one. It never got too cold or too hot to work. Snakes and bees can be a problem. Picking cotton on the chain gang is just hard. The sun is really hot and water is not plentiful." – From a handwritten statement, Adelson Galleries archives
Rembert learned to hand tool leather while incarcerated at a maximum-security prison in Reidsville, Georgia, where he crafted billfolds with simple geometric designs. After his release, Rembert married, moved north, and found employment as a longshoreman in Bridgeport, Connecticut. He began to craft leather again at his wife’s suggestion. She encouraged him to visually record the story of his life: growing up in the segregated South; doing backbreaking work on a cotton plantation; joining civil-rights rallies as a follower of Martin Luther King, Jr.; his arrest and near lynching; seven years in jail; and hard labor on the chain gang.
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Rembert’s tooled leather paintings resonate with a painful past, but they can portray happier memories as well, recalled of his hometown of Cuthbert, Georgia. For an artist with no formal training, he exhibits remarkable talent as both a creator and a storyteller. He has elevated prison-learned craft to museum-worthy art.
The intense patterning of Chain Gang Picking Cotton #2 is a phenomenal aspect of this work, not only visually, but reflective of cotton planting. Despite Rembert’s experience of cotton picking as a brutal job, he also remarked “I must admit that the cotton field was a pretty place. The farmers did a beautiful job of patterning the rows, so if you happen to ride by or pass a cotton field, it’s a beautiful sight. Some rows to the left, some to the right, and some straight.”