That's One Person

“I haven’t moved past the childhood days of my life when it comes to the artwork,” observes Winfred Rembert. “Most of the things I do now are just memories from a young guy, a teenager, you know, growing up in Cuthbert, Georgia.” As he speaks, Rembert is headed back to Cuthbert. He’s bringing a film crew with him, because now, as puts it, he’s “somebody.”

That somebody, you come to see early in All Me: The Life and Times of Winfred Rembert, is certainly a product of his childhood days. The film—which screens at Maysles Cinema on Wednesday, 11 January, followed by a Q&A with Rembert and director Vivian Ducat—traces how he has survived, by telling his stories in his art.

At once harrowing and heartening, these stories are represented in particularly vivid form: Rembert’s paintings are actually not made with paint, but with bright dyes he applies to leather canvases. The images show cotton fields and chain gangs, baptisms and lynchings. “They are real,’ says one supporter of his paintings. “These pictures are all chronicling events in his life, they are about him.” They are also about the US South during the 1960s, a world where, he recalls his great aunt telling him, “You don’t make waves, you know, you can’t change a thing. White people do what they want to do, how they want to do, and you can’t do nothing about it.” She was a survivor of “slavery time,” Rembert says, and heeding her lessons helped him to survive many hardships as well.

These hardships are introduced during the first scene in the documentary, as Rembert discusses a 2010 show at Adelson Galleries, with owner Jan Adelson. Stately and perfectly coiffed, she looks through a selection of paintings, asking what he wants each to be titled. This one is “Cuthbert Supermarket,” he agrees, the words emblazoned on the store sign that dominates the image. As they work, he sits among the other works of art the gallery features, impressionist paintings in soft pastels, work utterly unlike his own. When Adelson finds a painting of a chain gang, she pauses: “The chain gang has a ‘boss man,’ right?” she asks. Oh yes, he laughs, “Remember that, Jan!”

The moment is charming and weird and sharply revealing too. The world Rembert has entered into with his paintings could not be farther from the one he survived, and the people in these worlds share essentially nothing. But, as both Rembert and his wife Patsy make clear in the film, he means for his work to help everyone remember what happened to him and to those many others who didn’t survive or who don’t have the capacity to tell their lives. His paintings represent many experiences. He points to one showing prisoners in striped uniforms, an image born of his time in prison. “It’s so tough a life,” he says of the chain gang. “It makes you feel like you need to be more than one person in yourself. That’s one person, all these guys.”

This notion—that so many figures are “all me”—today makes Rembert’s paintings remarkable evocations of his resilience and ingenuity. He learned to work on leather in prison, where he was sent at age 19 by a judge without a trial, a story both ordinary for the time and place and extraordinary: inspired by hearing Martin Luther King. Jr. speak, he took part in several protests in 1965, one resulting in gunfire by the police. Rembert’s effort to escape were unsuccessful to the point that he was nearly lynched (hung from a tree by his feet, beaten and knifed), and then sentenced to 27 years inside. 

Here he met another prisoner, who lent him tools and modeled how to emboss and color the leather. That prisoner—serving three life sentences—made wallets and billfolds. Drawing from his lessons, Rembert began experimenting, making bags and wallets and then paintings too. He smiles now: “After he saw I had the ability to put different things on leather, he took his tools away from me.” But that didn’t’ stop the young Rembert, who made his own tools. “I’m used to making things,” he explains.

Released after seven years, Rembert married Patsy and moved to New Haven Connecticut. When he was injured and unable to work, Patsy supported them as a bus driver and insisted he focus on his art. Many of his paintings depict workers, memories of toiling alongside his great aunt and her daughter, his sister Lillian, who lists the many jobs mama worked, “picking cotton, shaking peanuts, pulling corn.” Others show individuals creating communities amid adversity, playing pool, dancing, and drinking at “Homer Clyde’s Place” or “The Hungry Eye Café.” His work has been categorized as “naïve,” observes museum educator Mary Kordak, but this hardly describes its craft or impact. (“Naïve artists, if they keep working at it,” Kordak notes, “They become more sophisticated.”)

While one expert insists on the value of Rembert’s work as “authentic,” and it’s tempting to compare it to that of other “naïve” or “black” artists (the film brings up Horace Pippin and Romare Beardon), these are, in the end, only earnest efforts to put the art into words. All Me helps you to see how the paintings do their work beyond words, how they tell stories and touch viewers in ways that can’t be explained in gallery brochures or reduced to museum captions. The film helps to reveal this process, in interviews with Rembert, his sister, his children, and his wife. But its most powerful moments—the stories that linger in your mind—are provided by the paintings.