Join us for Speed Reading Book Club, a book discussion inspired by both special exhibitions and artworks in the Speed’s permanent collection! You can find copies of all the Book Club books in the Museum Store.

Speed Reading Book Club is free with admission and will be in person.

June 21, 10:30 am – 12:00 pm

Book: Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist’s Memoir of the Jim Crow South by the late Winfred Rembert as told to Erin I. Kelly

Exhibition: Louisville’s Black Avant-Garde: Gloucester Caliman Coxe (June 19, 2025 – September 7, 2025)

Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist’s Memoir of the Jim Crow South by Winfred Rembert | Goodreads

Winfred Rembert grew up as a field hand on a Georgia plantation. He embraced the Civil Rights Movement, endured political violence, survived a lynching, and spent seven years in prison on a chain gang. Years later, seeking a fresh start at the age of 52, he discovered his gift and vision as an artist, and using leather tooling skills he learned in prison, started etching and painting scenes from his youth.

Rembert’s work has been exhibited at museums and galleries across the country, profiled in the New York Times and more, and honored by Bryan Stevenson’s Equal Justice Initiative. In Chasing Me to My Grave, he relates his life in prose and paintings—vivid, confrontational, revelatory, complex scenes from the cotton fields and chain gangs of the segregated south to the churches and night clubs of the urban north. This is also the story of finding epic love, and with it the courage to revisit a past that begs to remain buried, as told to Tufts philosopher Erin I. Kelly.