?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 100,000 - $ 150,000
WINFRED REMBERT (1945 - 2021) Jeff's Pool Room.
Dye on carved and tooled leather, circa 2015. 584x591 mm; 23x23 1/4 inches. Incised signature, lower right.
Provenance: acquired directly from the artist, private collection, Washington, DC (2018).
Winfred Rembert's Jeff's Pool Room is another significant work of the artist, with teeming activity in the figures and painted with rich colors. It is also an important subject, a location central to Winfred Rembert's young life in Georgia, and is revisited in several of his artworks. Jeff was an entrepreneur who owned a pool room in Cuthbert and gave the teenager Rembert his first job outside of working in the cotton fields. Eventually, Rembert ran the pool hall business himself after Jeff fell ill and was unable to work.
Born and raised in Cuthbert, Georgia, Winfred Rembert lived and worked as an artist in New Haven, CT. His unique artwork, painted on carved and tooled leather, displays memories of his youth—Black life in the Jim Crow South. His artistic vision calls forth vivid scenes from Georgia cotton fields and colorful characters from the juke joints and pool halls of Cuthbert. His paintings also chronicle his encounters with racial and police violence in the aftermath of a civil rights protest, and the seven years he spent on a Georgia chain gang.
Winfred Rembert's paintings have been exhibited at museums and galleries around the country, including the Yale University Art Gallery, the Hudson River Museum, and The Adelson Galleries in New York. In 2011 Rembert was the subject of an award-winning documentary film, All Me: The Life and Times of Winfred Rembert, by Vivian Ducat, and in 2015, Rembert was honored by Bryan Stevenson's Equal Justice Initiative. Recently, in November, 2019, NPR also aired a segment produced by StoryCorps on the artist. Winfred Rembert's 2021 memoir Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist's Memoir of the Jim Crow South written in collaboration with Erin I. Kelly, a professor of philosophy at Tufts University, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2022.
