The striking exhibition “Winfred Rembert: Caint to Caint,” at the recently opened Adelson Galleries Boston tells stories from the artist’s youth in the civil rights-era South, tooled in leather and painted with spicy-toned shoe dye.

Rembert grew up in an African-American sharecropping family in Cuthbert, Ga., where he picked cotton when he was small, making pennies on the pound. The show’s title piece, “Caint to Caint (Can’t see when you go to work, can’t see when you get back),” refers to long hours in the cotton fields.