Save this story for later. In âAshes to Ashes,â the artist Winfred Rembert and the activist and physician Shirley Jackson Whitaker reckon with the living legacy of racist violence in America. Sometimes the artist Winfred Rembert canât sleep at night. His wife, Patsy, says that it has to do with his work. âWhenever he do one of those pictures, he gets sick,â she explains. âHe has to double up on that medicine in order to get some rest.â Rembert first draws his scenes, full of faces and patterns, on paper, then carves the images onto a sheet of tanned leather by hand, texturing the surface with tools that look almost surgical, before filling in the etchings with vivid dyes. His paintings depict scenes of Black life in the Jim Crow South, and making them means dredging up painful memories from his youth, when he worked in cotton fields and on a prison-labor chain gang. Some artworks are healing or serve as sources of hope, Rembert says, in the documentary âAshes to Ashesââbut not his.