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Rembertâs âAll Me IIâ (2005). The chain gang was ruthless, he observed: âI had to take on all these personalities. I only wanted to be one of them, but the one I wanted to be I couldnât be.âArt works © Winfred Rembert / ARS
On March 31st, the artist Winfred Rembert died, at the age of seventy-five. He was born in 1945 and grew up in Cuthbert, Georgia, where he picked cotton as a child. As a teen-ager, he got involved in the civil-rights movement and was arrested in the aftermath of a demonstration. He later broke out of jail, survived a near-lynching, and spent seven years in prison, where he was forced to labor on chain gangs. Following his release, in 1974, he married Patsy Gammage, and they eventually settled in New Haven, Connecticut. At the age of fifty-one, with Patsyâs encouragement, he began carving and painting memories from his youth onto leather, using leather-tooling skills he had learned in priso ....