Two Rembert “Guardian Angels” Watch Over Bassett Street

By Lucy Gellman

Katro Storm climbed onto a section of bright green scaffolding, the surface glowing in the sun-drenched summer morning. Crouching down, he stopped at a stitch of black-and-gray shirtsleeve that was still unfinished, a paintbrush hovering over the wall. From close up, a person could make out slices of color, the black, white and gray undulating beside each other.

It was only from further back that two faces, both beloved in the neighborhood, instantly took shape. From where they looked out onto Bassett Street, Winfred and Patsy Rembert leaned into each other, foreheads pressed together in a kind of warm, all-encompassing embrace.

The two—the late artist Winfred Rembert, who passed away in 2021, and his beloved wife Patsy, who still lives in the neighborhood—are now the “guardian angels” of Lincoln-Bassett Community School, where they keep watch over the playground at the corner of Shelton Avenue and Bassett Street.

A long-held dream from Storm, who was close with Rembert for the last decade of his life, the mural has received support from public art nonprofit Site Projects, which last year appointed Liam Grace-Flood as its part-time executive director. Rembert’s son Mitchell, who has been learning to dye and carve leather in his father’s memory, has also assisted on the piece.

“I just wish he was around to see this,” said Storm, who for years lived close to the Remberts in a home on Ivy Street and Winchester Avenue. “I’ve painted many portraits of Mr. Rembert, and the more you know him, the more you’re gonna love him. It’s the same with Patsy. A lot of people don’t know the value of his work … I just wanted to bring attention to this artist and what a beautiful person he was.”

“For me to be up on that wall with my husband is an honor,” said Rembert’s wife, Patsy Rembert, in a phone call last week. “It is so special. I’m not gonna paint him as a hero, or say that he was the best man around, but he didn’t have a single fault about being a father and a provider. I don’t know how many different types of things he tried for his family. It was just beautiful to be his wife.”

Storm finished the piece in late August, meaning it will be ready for students when they return to the school later this month. But the story of the mural reaches back at least 10 years, to the first time that Storm met Rembert in Newhallville, and Rembert invited him over to his Newhall Street home. (While he and Patsy had lived for years on Beers Street in the city’s Dwight neighborhood, it was Newhallville that they called home for the last several decades of Winfred’s life.)

It was the beginning of a friendship that included long, winding stories and conversations about art and artmaking that could go on for hours. Every so often, Winfred would call for Patsy to bring out a work of art—Rembert became famous for his dyed and carved leather compositions, which documented years of racial oppression, anti-Black discrimination and deadly white supremacy in the American South—and he would tell Storm the story behind the piece, pointing out each detail along the way.

Storm, who briefly taught art at Lincoln-Bassett through the Connecticut Center for Arts & Technology (ConnCAT), was floored by the works, and the quiet, warm genius of the man who had carved them into being. He was amazed, likewise, by how many people didn’t seem to know who Rembert was as an artist, even if they knew him as a neighbor. 

So when Rembert died in 2021, Storm was already thinking about how to memorialize him, and other New Haven beloveds. With the exception of a mural honoring Dr. Edward Bouchet in Dixwell, and sculpture of engineer William Lanson nearby on Ashmun Street, there are few nods to trailblazing New Haveners in the area, or in the city.

At the time, Storm—an ACES Educational Center for the Arts (ECA) grad who was raised in New Haven and Hamen, and has never left those roots behind—had been living in the Northwest Corner of the state, making art that included site-specific projects and arts education in Sharon and Kent. When he heard that Rembert had passed, it was a shock to the system. It still is. And he knew he wanted to teach the neighborhood about who Rembert was.

Storm is the right man for the job: his renderings of Charles Twyman, Bruce Campbell, Ella Scantlebury, and other New Haven heroes graced the old Stetson Branch Library from 2009 until the building’s demolition in 2023. On the back of the same library, his mural of superheroes including T’Challa joined them. He also spent his early childhood in the neighborhood, before moving to Hamden when he was eight.

He also knew, and wanted to honor, that the couple was incredibly generous, with a shared soft spot for children in need. In addition to their own eight children—“I wanted 10 children and he said eight was enough,” Patsy remembered—the Remberts always had a space at the table and a spare place to sleep for kids in the neighborhood who needed it.

At one point, she estimated that there were close to 20 kids in the house, and somehow she and her husband found a way to care for all of them.

“Whatever I could do to help a child, I would do it,” Patsy said. “I would do it because I felt that you had an obligation to. I loved every one of them as if they were mine. … My pay was a smile on their faces and the carers that they finally got a chance to achieve.”

“I wanted them overlooking the playground because they are, like, guarding any of these kids out here,” Storm said. “This particular couple is here because they took care of so many kids.”

Storm wanted to translate all of that into his work, he added. The stories struck a chord: years ago, he helped raise his sister’s children after she died of cancer when they were still young. He remembers how hard and wondrous it was to help them navigate the big, wide world. He’s also taught art classes inside Lincoln-Bassett, and knows what it means to scrimp and scrounge for your own art supplies because there are next to none in the school.

What he didn’t expect was how joyful, and how communal, the act of painting so close to a playground would be. Most days, the Remberts’ eldest daughter Lillian stops by on her mail route, which takes her through the neighborhood. Patsy, who still lives down the street, will come through and regale him with stories. Neighbors come by and bring him bottles of water, especially on scorching days.

Cecil Boyce, a local DJ, will come out and play music. And when he’s working, “you got the little voices of kids giggling and playing. It’s a beautiful location,” he said.Storm added that he wanted a place where Rembert, who was the victim of horrific anti-Black racism throughout his life, could finally have a full childhood.

“You want to put them in a place where they can be happy,” he said. “It’s one of the projects I’m most proud of.”

Patsy Rembert pictured in 2022. Lucy Gellman File Photo. 

He added that working with Mitchell Rembert, who is carrying on his dad’s legacy, has been a joy. For the younger Rembert, the feeling is mutual.

“It’s definitely inspiring and I feel like it’s a once in a lifetime chance to work with Katro,” Mitchell said. “He admired my dad, and I admire his work. Him stepping up to be a mentor, it means a lot to me. Having Katro there is a godsend.”

While Storm’s primary audience may be children, it’s also a reminder to the neighborhood—and New Haven—that neighbors belong to each other. When Winfred Rembert married Patsy Gammage in 1974, he had already survived enough emotional and physical exhaustion for a lifetime, including a harrowing near-lynching and years on a chain gang that he later translated into his art.

And yet, here he was, a big, warm smile on his face, his heart all the way open.

The husband and father she knew was never hardened to the world, Patsy remembered. He provided for his wife and children, making time for them even after endlessly long days. He worked multiple jobs, with a gift for tinkering and large-scale equipment that stopped only when his diabetes became too severe to continue. In return, she stayed at home until her kids were teenagers, and then started driving school buses to bring in extra income.

“We were two people who struggled and stayed together in spite of all the trials and tribulations that came,” she said. “We felt that our children was worth the sacrifice … He was everything to me. Everything to me. It’s taken time for me to realize that I gotta keep living, because I didn’t want to live after he passed.”

That legacy is one that Storm wants to keep building on. For years now, he and a few fellow artists (including Mitchell Rembert) have been talking about the need to honor local heroes, from the Remberts to the Ashe family, which has been running the eponymously named barbershop for three generations.

The first time he climbed onto the work’s 15-foot scaffolding, Storm got emotional thinking about the impact Rembert had not just on the fine art world, but in New Haven.

“I wish I had more time on this earth to visit with him,” Storm said. He looked around to the wider sun-soaked neighborhood: down Shelton Avenue, where a few people waited for the bus, then down Bassett Street, as a dad and son made their way to the playground. “There’s a lot of history here.”