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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 Weigh Your Cotton, one is initially captivated by its vibrant colors and memorizing patterned composition, but upon further inspection, an oppressive reality becomes acutely apparent. Born in Cuthbert, Georgia in 1945, Winfred Rembert did not start creating art until the age of 51, after two times in jail and a near-lynching. Rembert was born into the Jim Crow South where he grew up picking cotton and peanuts. 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. Rembert’s biography 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. In Weigh Your Cotton, Rembert returns to a familiar subject. The repetitive composition and seemingly endless rows of cotton stalks is overwhelming, as if to communicate that the day’s work will never end, and neither will the oppression and suffering. Each laborer within the rows strides in the same direction with a black sack over their shoulder, reaching forward and connecting with one another. In the foreground, the workers continue to pick, but here, Rembert positions their bodies and arms moving in every direction, imparting a palpable energy and encouraging the viewer’s eye to travel with the movements of the figures. The composition centers around the large red horse-drawn wagon being filled with the haul of cotton bolls. In his work, Rembert not only remembers a very personal experience, but also shares the collective memory of the Black community.
– 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 Weigh Your Cotton, one is initially captivated by its vibrant colors and memorizing patterned composition, but upon further inspection, an oppressive reality becomes acutely apparent. Born in Cuthbert, Georgia in 1945, Winfred Rembert did not start creating art until the age of 51, after two times in jail and a near-lynching. Rembert was born into the Jim Crow South where he grew up picking cotton and peanuts. 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. Rembert’s biography 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. In Weigh Your Cotton, Rembert returns to a familiar subject. The repetitive composition and seemingly endless rows of cotton stalks is overwhelming, as if to communicate that the day’s work will never end, and neither will the oppression and suffering. Each laborer within the rows strides in the same direction with a black sack over their shoulder, reaching forward and connecting with one another. In the foreground, the workers continue to pick, but here, Rembert positions their bodies and arms moving in every direction, imparting a palpable energy and encouraging the viewer’s eye to travel with the movements of the figures. The composition centers around the large red horse-drawn wagon being filled with the haul of cotton bolls. In his work, Rembert not only remembers a very personal experience, but also shares the collective memory of the Black community.