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拍品专文
In an accompanying letter, Winfred Rembert remembers his youth, “Everybody at Butch Jordan’s café would say let’s go cross the tracks on Saturdays everything would start late, so we would dance at Butch Jordan’s in the [McDonald] Woods, the woods is where I lived, the tracks wasn’t as popular as the woods but at Bubba and Fee[t]s we did have a good time.”
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. Here, Rembert recalls a section of Hamilton Avenue, the main throughway in Cuthbert where he and his community frequented shops and enjoyed nights out dancing. The street is busy with people and cars, including a truck full of watermelons and a tractor heading out around the curve in the road. Some of the businesses are recognizable by name and are seen in other works by Rembert, like Feet’s Bar, Zeb’s Shoe Shine, Shang Hi’s Place and Minnie’s Sandwich Shop (see Hamilton Avenue, 1999 and Jeff’s Café, 1997). In his biography Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist’s Memoir of the Jim Crow South, Rembert remembers Feet’s as “the best place to go as a teenager, if you loved dancing. There was good soul and R&B music on the jukebox – Major Lance, Rufus Thomas, Glady Knight, B.B. King, James Brown – and they would play it for you. You didn’t have to put money in the jukebox. All they wanted was for you to buy soda pop, milkshakes and floats” (p. 47). 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.
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. Here, Rembert recalls a section of Hamilton Avenue, the main throughway in Cuthbert where he and his community frequented shops and enjoyed nights out dancing. The street is busy with people and cars, including a truck full of watermelons and a tractor heading out around the curve in the road. Some of the businesses are recognizable by name and are seen in other works by Rembert, like Feet’s Bar, Zeb’s Shoe Shine, Shang Hi’s Place and Minnie’s Sandwich Shop (see Hamilton Avenue, 1999 and Jeff’s Café, 1997). In his biography Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist’s Memoir of the Jim Crow South, Rembert remembers Feet’s as “the best place to go as a teenager, if you loved dancing. There was good soul and R&B music on the jukebox – Major Lance, Rufus Thomas, Glady Knight, B.B. King, James Brown – and they would play it for you. You didn’t have to put money in the jukebox. All they wanted was for you to buy soda pop, milkshakes and floats” (p. 47). 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.