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拍品专文
“That’s the very first thing I can remember in my life. I opened my eyes and I saw that cotton, and it was a beautiful thing. When you get out there picking in it, though, you change your mind about how beautiful it is.”
– Winfred Rembert, Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist’s Memoir of the Jim Crow South (New York, 2021), p. 17.
When looking at Winfred Rembert’s Cotton Pickers, one is initially capitated by the memorizing patterned composition, but upon closer inspection, an oppressive reality becomes acutely apparent. In Cotton Pickers, Rembert returns to a familiar subject. The many rows of cotton stalks are overwhelming, as if to communicate that the day’s work will never end, and neither will the oppression and suffering. The laborers stride in the same direction, from left to right, and reach forward connecting with one another. A very pregnant woman in the upper row holds her swollen belly and yells out in pain. A man holds her shoulders and offers support, while the woman next to her looks up toward the sky as if asking a higher being for spiritual guidance and fortitude. In his memoir, Rembert recalls how common it was for women to give birth in the cotton field, “Women had their babies and they’d go right back to work, right then and there” (Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist’s Memoir of the Jim Crow South (New York, 2021), p. 23). Two young children appear in this painting: a girl in the upper right and boy at lower left. The young boy may be a self-portrait of Rembert as he often represents himself in his work as a child. This work is a departure from Rembert’s well-known cotton picking pictures which are brightly hued with more compact compositions. The figures in those works are largely anonymous. Meanwhile, in the present picture, Rembert individualizes each face. This very intimate scene forces the viewer to engage and face the reality of this dark history.
Born in Cuthbert, Georgia in 1945, Rembert did not start creating art until the age of 51, after two times in jail and a near-lynching. As a teenager, he was involved in the Civil Rights Movement. He was first arrested after one demonstration which ended with him running from armed policemen and stealing an unlocked car as a means to get away. He then escaped jail, was caught once more and hung by a mob of white men, but not killed. He spent the next seven years on a chain gang. Later in life after his release from jail, he married his wife Patsy Gammage and settled in New Haven, Connecticut. Patsy encouraged Rembert to use his leather-tooling skills that he learned while in prison to create pictures. His autobiographical work ranges from depictions of joyful memories of his childhood to the realities of the Jim Crow South and incarceration as a Black man. Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist’s Memoir of the Jim Crow South was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2022, a year after his passing.
– Winfred Rembert, Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist’s Memoir of the Jim Crow South (New York, 2021), p. 17.
When looking at Winfred Rembert’s Cotton Pickers, one is initially capitated by the memorizing patterned composition, but upon closer inspection, an oppressive reality becomes acutely apparent. In Cotton Pickers, Rembert returns to a familiar subject. The many rows of cotton stalks are overwhelming, as if to communicate that the day’s work will never end, and neither will the oppression and suffering. The laborers stride in the same direction, from left to right, and reach forward connecting with one another. A very pregnant woman in the upper row holds her swollen belly and yells out in pain. A man holds her shoulders and offers support, while the woman next to her looks up toward the sky as if asking a higher being for spiritual guidance and fortitude. In his memoir, Rembert recalls how common it was for women to give birth in the cotton field, “Women had their babies and they’d go right back to work, right then and there” (Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist’s Memoir of the Jim Crow South (New York, 2021), p. 23). Two young children appear in this painting: a girl in the upper right and boy at lower left. The young boy may be a self-portrait of Rembert as he often represents himself in his work as a child. This work is a departure from Rembert’s well-known cotton picking pictures which are brightly hued with more compact compositions. The figures in those works are largely anonymous. Meanwhile, in the present picture, Rembert individualizes each face. This very intimate scene forces the viewer to engage and face the reality of this dark history.
Born in Cuthbert, Georgia in 1945, Rembert did not start creating art until the age of 51, after two times in jail and a near-lynching. As a teenager, he was involved in the Civil Rights Movement. He was first arrested after one demonstration which ended with him running from armed policemen and stealing an unlocked car as a means to get away. He then escaped jail, was caught once more and hung by a mob of white men, but not killed. He spent the next seven years on a chain gang. Later in life after his release from jail, he married his wife Patsy Gammage and settled in New Haven, Connecticut. Patsy encouraged Rembert to use his leather-tooling skills that he learned while in prison to create pictures. His autobiographical work ranges from depictions of joyful memories of his childhood to the realities of the Jim Crow South and incarceration as a Black man. Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist’s Memoir of the Jim Crow South was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2022, a year after his passing.