Winfred Rembert: Amazing Grace, the first major museum exhibition dedicated to this remarkable mid-career, self-taught artist, shows the dramatic, biographical nature of Rembert’s art as it documents the tumultuous moments of civil rights history. More than 50 original works that Rembert created from stretched, stained, and etched leather, historical photographs of his life, and a new documentary of his work, created by noted filmmaker Vivian Ducat, will be on view. In the galleries, traditional gospel music, pivotal for Rembert, will be heard in recordings, and Rembert will both sing gospel songs and discuss his experiences in the galleries on several dates.

Rembert, a boy growing up in 1950s rural Georgia, did backbreaking labor in the cotton fields. A young man, he barely escaped arrest during a 1960’s civil rights march, and survived a near lynching. A prisoner serving an unjust seven-year sentence, he learned to make pattern and design on hand tooled leather by watching a fellow inmate create tooled leather wallets. Years later in colorful tableaux on tanned leather, Rembert conjured a world of incredible brutality and close personal ties existing in discomforting proximity
 
Amazing Grace’s riveting themes include the Cotton Field series, where cotton balls snake relentlessly through rows where field hands toiled. Rembert notes, “curved [cotton] rows make a beautiful pattern. But as soon as you start picking, you forget how good it looks and think how hard it is. There just isn’t anything you can say about cotton that is good.”  Another theme explores the lighter side of Rembert’s memories of small town Cuthbert, Georgia. He populates his canvases with the town’s characters and scenes of a pool hall, jazz club, café, and church meetings.

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, which will include essays by Bartholomew Bland, Director of Curatorial Affairs, Hudson River Museum and Roger Panetta, the museum’s Adjunct Curator of History and History Professor, Fordham University. Rembert’s work is currently the subject of a dissertation by Fordham University Ph.D. candidate Clifton Watson, and the catalogue will include an essay co-authored by Watson and Irma Watkins-Owens, Associate Professor, African and African American Studies, Fordham University.

This exhibition is organized by the Hudson River Museum and curated by Bartholomew F. Bland.

Celebrating Black History Month, the Museum presents a display of the proposed public-art project The Enslaved Africans’ Rain Garden, designed to honor African slaves freed by law in the United States. The project, developed by Yonkers sculptor Vinnie Bagwell, proposes to commemorate Africans who resided at the Philipse Manor Hall in Yonkers — six of whom were among the first to be manumitted by law in the United States, 76 years before the Emancipation Proclamation. The installation features maquettes (one-third scale models) of the planned sculptures, architectural drawings of a corresponding park setting, and historical information about slavery in Westchester. The Enslaved Africans’ Rain Garden focuses on the lives of the men, women, and children, who were imbruted and stripped of their human rights. When Yonkers City Councilwoman Patricia McDow attended an exhibit on slavery at Philipse Manor Hall several years ago, she asked, “Where were the slaves buried?” But no one seemed to know. McDow quickly locked onto the idea of a monument commemorating these slaves and reached out to Bagwell, who as co-founder and director of Art on Main Street/ Yonkers, Inc., has managed a series of provocative exhibitions and programs.

clockwise from upper left
Maquettes from the proposed
public-art project:
Sola and Olumide
Themba
Bibi

Miniscule Manse Moves to New Gallery
November 27, 2011

There’s a house moving at the Hudson River Museum. It’s Nybelwyck Hall, a 24 room dollhouse that will be seen and enjoyed in its own gallery starting Friday, November 27.

Dollhouse enthusiast Mark O’Banks created Nybelwyck Hall, over the course of a decade and looked to the wisdom of a ouija board to name his creation. The house is furnished with found objects and rugs O’Banks designed. Among its 900 objects are minute musical instruments that play, doors with intricate locks that work, and a tiny dollhouse within the dollhouse’s nursery.

Nybelwyck Hall does more than present Lilliputian life at its most luxurious.  The Nybelwick family, “one of the oldest of Dutch ancestry in the Hudson River Valley,” are having a “theatrical moment,” as they bustle to prepare an engagement party for Celestine Von Nybelwyck, daughter of the house, who does not love her intended. Like all families, each Nybelwick is a member, living, laughing, and scheming. The Nybelwycks who occupy or visit the Hall include Dad, “Old” Bostwyck Van Nybelwyck; an elf, who watches over the family; eccentric Aunt Glencora, who lives in the attic; ghosts, a music teacher, a raft of nieces and nephews, and servants.

Nybelwyck Hall evokes Hudson River homes still seen today. The Museum’s historic home, Glenview, a  24-room, granite-and-mortar home and Nybelwyck, the 24-room dollhouse, share architectural features — a Great Hall and a double staircase that curves from the top floor down to the Hall. Nybelwyck’s central facade is loosely based on the Hudson River estate, Staatsburg, the Ogden Mills House. The orange-and-green colors on its Victorian addition are reminiscent of Wilderstein, in Rhinebeck, the family home of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s personal secretary.