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Event to Honor the Art and Legacy of New Haven Resident Winfred Rembert

The roofline of Sterling Law Building with three brick chimneys of different sizes

The Justice Collaboratory at Yale Law School and Public Humanities at Yale will host an event honoring the life and legacy of artist and longtime New Haven resident Winfred Rembert. The event, which is free and open to the public, will include a distinguished panel for an evening of discussion and community. It will take place on Oct. 27 from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. at NXTHVN, 169 Henry St., New Haven. Registration is required to attend.

Soda Shop by Winfred Rembert
Soda Shop, 2004 © Estate of Winfred Rembert / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Rembert (1945-2021) grew up in a family of field laborers in Cuthbert, Georgia. He joined the Civil Rights movement as a teenager, survived a near-lynching at the hands of law enforcement, and spent seven years on chain gangs. He met his future wife, Patsy, while he was in prison and doing forced labor near her home in Turner County, Georgia. After four years of letter writing, the two married upon his release in 1974 and moved north. They settled in New Haven, where they raised eight children and Patsy Rembert became a longtime youth advocate. 

With the encouragement of his wife, Rembert began to pursue art seriously at the age of 51. Using leather-tooling skills he had learned in prison, Rembert shared his life story by carving, tooling, and painting autobiographical scenes from his youth onto leather canvas. His paintings have been exhibited at museums and galleries around the country.

Rembert was honored by the Equal Justice Initiative in 2015, and in 2016 received a United States Artists Barr Fellowship. His illustrated memoir, Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist's Memoir of the Jim Crow South, as told to Erin I. Kelly, was long listed for the Carnegie Medal of Excellence in Nonfiction and won the Mary Lynn Kotz Award for Art in Literature and the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Biography. (The New Yorker published an excerpt, Rembert’s account of surviving the chain gang, in 2021.)

Panelists include intimates of Rembert, artists, and scholars: 

  • Patsy Rembert (Rembert’s wife of 46 years, youth advocate)
  • Erin l. Kelly (Rembert’s co-author, Professor of Philosophy, Tufts University)
  • Reginald Dwayne Betts (Justice Collaboratory member, Founder and Director of Freedom Reads)
  • Elizabeth Hinton (Justice Collaboratory member, Associate Professor of History Yale Univesity, and Professor of Law Yale Law School)
  • Kymberly N. Pinder (Dean, Yale School of Art)