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Lot Essay
Pop Guns is an innocent and joyful memory of Winfred Rembert’s youth. As a boy, Rembert set up a makeshift store behind his mother’s house which he called Winfred’s Toy Shop. There, he showed off his homemade wares and games to his friends, including popguns. As Rembert remembers, “My popguns were great.” To make a popgun, he would find a stick and hollow its center. He would then whittle another stick to fit in the hole. Rembert would load the hollowed stick with two berries, “berries from a chinaberry tree were best”, and shoot them out using the smaller stick which “made a ‘pop’ sound – that was real fun!’" (Winfred Rembert, Don’t Hold Me Back: My Life and Art (Chicago, 2003), p. 14). Here, Rembert shows three young boys, holding green sticks and soda bottles, waiting to play a round of popguns. The vibrant colors and happy expressions create a cheerful scene, but upon close inspection, one notices the ripped and tattered clothes of the boy in green. Rembert also depicts their feet very large and out of proportion, emphasizing that they are shoeless. Despite this being a jovial memory, it also serves as a reminder of the poverty that Rembert experienced.
Born in Cuthbert, Georgia in 1945, Winfred Rembert did not start creating art until the age of 51, after two times in jail and a near-lynching. Rembert was born into the Jim Crow South where he grew up picking cotton and peanuts. As a teenager, he was involved in the Civil Rights Movement. He was first arrested after one demonstration which ended with him running from armed policemen and stealing an unlocked car as a means to get away. He then escaped jail, was caught once more and hung by a mob of white men, but not killed. He spent the next seven years on a chain gang. Later in life after his release from jail, he married his wife Patsy Gammage and settled in New Haven, Connecticut. Patsy encouraged Rembert to use his leather-tooling skills that he learned while in prison to create pictures. His work ranges from depictions of joyful memories of his childhood to the realities of the Jim Crow South and incarceration as a Black man. Rembert’s biography Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist’s Memoir of the Jim Crow South was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2022, a year after his passing.
Born in Cuthbert, Georgia in 1945, Winfred Rembert did not start creating art until the age of 51, after two times in jail and a near-lynching. Rembert was born into the Jim Crow South where he grew up picking cotton and peanuts. As a teenager, he was involved in the Civil Rights Movement. He was first arrested after one demonstration which ended with him running from armed policemen and stealing an unlocked car as a means to get away. He then escaped jail, was caught once more and hung by a mob of white men, but not killed. He spent the next seven years on a chain gang. Later in life after his release from jail, he married his wife Patsy Gammage and settled in New Haven, Connecticut. Patsy encouraged Rembert to use his leather-tooling skills that he learned while in prison to create pictures. His work ranges from depictions of joyful memories of his childhood to the realities of the Jim Crow South and incarceration as a Black man. Rembert’s biography Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist’s Memoir of the Jim Crow South was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2022, a year after his passing.