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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart. Today's Black Art History segment we'll hear about a new show opening tomorrow at the Hauser & Wirth Gallery, featuring the work of the late artist Winfred Rembert, who passed away in 2021 at 75. He became a sought-after artist later in life with work, documenting the experience of the Jim Crow South. Informed by his own life as a Black man raised in the south, who got caught in the legal system for a period of time, and who barely survived in attempted lynching in the 1960s. The show, All of Me features his dyed tooled leather pieces that tell stories. They're colorful depictions of the pool hall he enjoyed as a young person.

Stories of the civil rights marches he attended, and of the cotton fields he worked as a child in Cuthbert, Georgia. Here's Winfred Rembert, recalling that time to a journalist at New Haven Public Radio, WNHH.

Winfred Rembert: The first thing I can remember in this world, anything at all was cotton. Just the big, big sea of cotton, just as far as you can see, dynamically all the way around 360 degrees, all the way around just cotton far as you can go.

Alison Stewart: That image is seen in the first piece you encountered in this show All of Me, Rembert's memory, and I, for detail, are evident in his work. The 40-plus work show how Rembert brought humanity to people who weren't often afforded it. The show takes his name from a piece depicting prisoners and black and white uniforms working on a chain gang as he did during his incarceration as a young man. He told professor and his biographer, Aaron Kelly, "I've painted a lot of pictures of the chain gang. I believe that many people in the free world thought bad of the chain gang. They looked at the workers on the chain gang work in the highways and in the ditches, and I believe they thought that these guys were killers. With the paintings, I was trying to show that it wasn't that way."

That recollection and many more are featured in a book about his life, Chasing Me to the Grave, and artist's Memoir of the Jim Crow South, which won the Pulitzer Prize six months after his death in March of 2021. In conjunction with the show at Hauser & Wirth, there'll be a free screening of the film about his life, All of Me: The Life and Times of Winfred Rembert Saturday at Anthology Film Archives. There'll be a discussion with the film's director Vivian Duca and Aaron Kelly, the co-author of Winfred's Memoir, who will give a talk after the screening. Joining them will be Winfred's wife, Patsy, who is so very important to his life and his career, and has been telling his story. Patsy Rembert joins me now. Patsy, nice to meet you.

Patsy Rembert: Nice meeting you too.

Alison Stewart: As does Koji Inoue of Hauser & Wirth. Koji, thank you for being with us.

Koji Inoue: Of course. My pleasure.

Alison Stewart: Patsy, the story goes in his late 40s and 50s your husband, you encouraged him to pursue art. He said in a documentary, "My wife kept telling me I could do it, that I had talent." When did you realize he had this talent?

Patsy Rembert: Well, almost he just had a knack for doing things that was out of the ordinary, and I thought that his work that he was doing for his kids, he could make money at doing it because he was just so good at what he was doing. He did stuff for them, like paint their clothes and put cartoons and images on them, and he was doing things no one else was doing at that time too. I just thought he was great.

Alison Stewart: Koji to follow up on that, what is unique about Mr. Rembert's work, and how does this leather tooling help tell these stories in a unique way?

Koji Inoue: Yes, I remember first encountering the work in a collector's home many, many years ago, and it just arrested my vision and stuff. I've never seen anything like that. Who's doing that? No one has ever-- how has that made? It just had so many questions. As Patsy was just saying, it just came from a person who was a real renaissance man who was great. Draftsman incredible with composition and color, but also a great singer [laughter] had so much to give and so much energy.

Yes, when we first encountered the painting tooled leather which he had learned from another inmate and adapted it from something very utilitarian and making belts and purses into telling stories of his life. It's just a combination of all these things. It's like nothing we've seen before.

Alison Stewart: Patsy, how long did it usually take him to make one of his pieces, and when did he work? Did he work at night? Did he work here and there?

Patsy Rembert: Most of the time it was at night, but to tell you how long it would take him I couldn't tell you because he never worked on one piece, he worked on several pieces.

Alison Stewart: Oh, interesting.

Patsy Rembert: He would work on this piece for a while, something would come to mind and he would start another picture and he get about part the way through it, that something else would come to mind and he'd start. He'd have three or four pictures that he would be working on at the same time.

Alison Stewart: Koji, let's talk about

[crosstalk]

Patsy Rembert: [unintelligible 00:05:32] check back and forward to different ones.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk about a few pieces in the show. What are the first pieces we see when we enter the gallery on East 69th?

Koji Inoue: Well, the first one you'll see is Cain't To Cain't and Patsy, maybe you can tell the story.

Patsy Rembert: Cain't To Cain't is a picture that depicts the time that you go to work and the time that you get off. You can't see when you go, you can't see when you come home. You're home by the truck lights, and you go to work by the truck lights.

Koji Inoue: It's a very colorful picture in the center of the cotton field, and then on the left and the right side of that painting it's in total darkness.

Alison Stewart: Koji, we talked about this success happening later in Mr. Rembert's life, when and how did the larger art world start to notice his talent?

Koji Inoue: He is broadly collected in museums, so from the curatorial community I think there's been a long following. In some circles outsider art community, if you will was the first to embrace the art, but I really don't see a distinction between outsider, insider, their artists, they're fantastic. Curators and institutions really heralded the work and would say that Jock Reynolds was probably an early person to adopt the work from Yale University Art Gallery.

They had acquired a very important trip tick, and then from there it was really just word of mouth. Then the work of [unintelligible 00:07:24] who is co-representing the estate along with Hauser & Wirth and just continued to just put on great shows, and yes, that's --

Alison Stewart: We're discussing All of Me, which is at Hauser & Wirth on East 69th Street. It opens tomorrow. My guests are Koji Inoue from Hauser & Wirth, and Patsy Rembert, the widow of Winfred Rembert. There's a piece Patsy, called Flower Bread.

Patsy Rembert: Oh, yes. The Flower Bread is a piece that he did to honor his mom, who we called his mom, which was really his great aunt. She was allergic to flour and she would have to wear a mask over her face in order to fix him cakes and stuff like that, and she did. He did that picture to honor her and memory of --

Alison Stewart: Some of the pieces are so joyful, like that one, honoring his aunt, and then some of these pictures are really painful. I've watched the pieces of the documentary where it's difficult, and he was such a sensitive soul. How did you support your husband when he was revisiting some of these painful memories to make his work?

Patsy Rembert: The first thing was that I felt like he needed to put it down where people could see it, then write a little short piece about what it was talking about in order for these things not to be forgotten and hopefully not repeated. I thought his life was interested, and I thought this was a story he needed to tell because it was a story of him, but it also told a story of so many more that didn't live to tell the story. That's why I thought it was a good idea.

Alison Stewart: Some of his work recalls this horrible moments in this attempted lynching. I'll tell the story a little bit and I'll play a little clip from an interview. It's a very short clip and I don't want to play the part where it becomes graphic out of respect. He'd been a civil rights at event that turned ugly. He was being chased by two white men with guns. He stole a car to get away. He was ultimately caught. After sitting in jail for at least a year without due process, Winfred escaped and he locked a deputy in the prison cell. He was caught, returned to jail, but then a white mob came for him. Let's listen to a little bit of what happened. This is short, as I mentioned because I don't want to get to the part that's too graphic.

[audio playback]

Winfred Rembert: And the next thing I know is at least I would say 75 white people there. They put me in a car, the trunk of a car, and took me for a ride. The next thing I know, when they opened the trunk, I looked, they're jubbing me and hitting me while I'm in the trunk of the car. Then I happened to look past them and I saw two noose hanging in the tree. It was a place designed to take people's life. I thought that was my life-taker. They took me over and they didn't put the rope around my neck. They put it around my feet, and they drew me up in upside down.

Alison Stewart: He was later stabbed and poked with a knife. Patsy, I've heard him tell that story quietly and calmly. I've also seen video of him telling it with great emotion and tears. When was the first time he told you that story?

Patsy Rembert: Oh, we have been married over five years. Maybe 10 years after we married. He finally started to loosen up enough to tell me some of the things that had happened to him. We had some very good close friends and he just started telling it. It just all came out. It was something that he had been holding inside for so long because he didn't feel like anyone would believe what he had to say. When he started telling it, it was four of us, Sharon and Phil McBlain, and he started to tell us what had happened to him and it just come up.

Alison Stewart: Did making his art help him in any way?

Patsy Rembert: Well, it gave him an outlet to be able to tell what had happened because he would talk so close to what had happened to him, talking to our children and other kids that we took in to try to motivate them to learn all they could learn and take part in whatever they could take part in because they had the freedom to do it. He was trying to explain why he didn't have the freedom.

At the same time, I think it was an outlet. It didn't kill him, but it was a way that he could actually talk about it and tell people about it and hope that they would believe it. Then he got the opportunity to have some of these stories taped by the people that it actually happened to. To verify that what he was saying was true, so that hope him a great deal.

Alison Stewart: Koji, how can art like this help expand people's minds?

Koji Inoue: Yes. That was really why as a gallery we wanted to get involved and it's core to our mission. As I mentioned earlier, we are co-representing the estate with Fort Gansevoort. Everything that we do in this community around Winfred is to extend his story and his legacy and his art with the world. Fort Gansevoort is one gallery here in New York. Hauser & Wirth is a larger gallery with 16 locations around the world.

Working together we can show this art to the world and tell this story and continue to extend it's always been there. Like you say, what is this moment that it really took off or anything like this, but it doesn't really work like that. It's always been there. Now, it's just for us to share it with the world.

Alison Stewart: Patsy, there's a lovely portrait titled Patsy and Me, [laughs] meaning Winfred. What's the origin of Patsy and Me?

Patsy Rembert: Well, we had a strange unusual get-together. In other words, how we met and high-end probably it would've been for us to even be together, talk to each other. It says Patsy and Me because we had struggled to be together. He was a secret to all of them over a year. No one knew that I was sneaking to see him, and no one knew he was writing me. I would get out of school at 3:00, and I would get to the mailbox by 3:15 and I would get his letters and go down in the woods and read them, bring them back home, and put them under my bed in a shoebox and hide.

It was one of those types of things that he was my secret. His letters are so wonderful for me, I felt he took me to places in his letters that I had never been before. It was exciting.

Alison Stewart: That's extraordinary because he was writing you while he was incarcerated?

Patsy Rembert: Yes.

Alison Stewart: Tells you what imagination he had, that he could bring you to places that you'd never thought about.

Patsy Rembert: He'd always include me in what was going to happen after we got married. That was always the plan we was going to marry. He would include me and he would ask me what I wanted and I would tell him what I want. Believe it or not, he got everything even down to the dog that I wanted. I wanted a dog, like [unintelligible 00:15:39] Once we got married, it was a joyous time for me.

Alison Stewart: You can see Patsy and Me and many other works at Hauser & Wirth East 69th Street Gallery. It opens tomorrow. All of Me, the work of Winfred Rembert. My guests have been Kogi Inoue and Patsy Rembert. Thank you so much for being with us.

Koji Inoue: Thank you, also.

Patsy Rembert: Thank you for having us.

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