(American, 1945-2021)

Three Women, signed verso "Winfred Rembert", dye on carved and tooled leather, 19-1/2 x 14 in.; metal frame, 20 x 14-1/2 in.

Provenance: By descent in the family of the artist's sister

Note: Born in rural Georgia and raised in a community tied to the cotton fields, Winfred Rembert survived a childhood of poverty in the segregated South of the 1940s. He would go on to be a nationally recognized artist, and his biography - Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist's Memoir of the Jim Crow South - was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2022.

It was not a well paved path. In 1966, after a demonstration in Americus, Georgia, Rembert was arrested and put in jail without being charged. A year later, he escaped but was caught and hung up by a group of deputy sheriffs. He spent the next seven years in a chain gang. Remarkably, he met his future wife, Patsy while building roads and bridges in rural Georgia as part of his prison sentence. While in prison, a man named TJ taught him how to carve wallets out of leather, a skill that he would use decades later in his embossed leather paintings.

After his release, Rembert and Patsy married and they moved to New York, then Connecticut, where he worked a variety of jobs. Not until in his 50s, after a second round in prison, did he begin to draw and paint the scenes of his youth, carving the stories into tactile leather canvases.

In 2000, Rembert had a well publicized show at the Yale University Art Gallery, and his 2010 coming out show at Adelson Galleries in New York received significant critical acclaim.