Jesse Krimes makes art that stems from his six years in prison on drug charges. But he isn’t trying to evoke what it feels like to be jailed. Rather than portray the dehumanization of individuals in the system — as, for example, Gordon Parks did in his 1957 Life magazine photos at the San Quentin prison — Krimes marshals the strategies of conceptual and pop art. He appropriates and manipulates images he takes from the media or art history books, everything from mug shots to medieval tapestries, to recreate the fragmentary way that the world filters through to the incarcerated. The works, which are often large-scaled, aim to convey the enormity of the American penal system, which confines nearly two million people in federal and state prisons.
His art is the subject of two New York shows, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Jack Shainman Gallery. In “Jesse Krimes: Corrections” at the Met, the curator Lisa Sutcliffe cannily pairs his work with a panoply of Alphonse Bertillon’s mug shots of suspected anarchists, which the Paris police assembled as part of a machinery of surveillance in the 1890s. The wall of grim standardized portraits faces off against “Purgatory” (2009), a piece that Krimes, 42, made during a year of pretrial solitary confinement.
Repurposing decks of poker cards, which the prison inmates played by calling out hands from their isolated cells, Krimes glued together 21 cards with toothpaste to make a flat brick, cut out a rectangle from a face card he placed on top, and then filled the cavity with a small bar of prison-issued soap on which he had transferred a mug shot drawn from a local paper’s crime reports. Eventually, he branched out to include portraits of celebrities, in the belief that anyone might become an outlaw. He constructed nearly 300 of these and mailed them out, two at a time, to a friend. “Purgatory” is now in the permanent collection of the Met.
Before falling afoul of the law, Krimes had earned a degree in art from Millersville University in Pennsylvania in 2008. Once he was convicted and sent to a federal penitentiary, he embarked on a project even more ambitious than “Purgatory”: “Apokaluptein: 16389067” (2010-13). (The title is a combination of the Greek word for “apocalypse” and the identification number he was issued in prison.)
Using hair gel, he transferred images from The New York Times and imprinted them onto 39 bedsheets. He has said that the bedsheets were designed to conceal bodies, as are prisons — which, like many of his associations, will not be apparent to most viewers.
Years later, that piece became a standout at a traveling group exhibition, “Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration,” which debuted at MoMA PS1 in 2020. There it was curved like a 19th-century panoramic painting, but at the Met, where for the first time it is displayed in its entirety, it hangs flat, 15 feet high and 40 feet wide.
“Apokaluptein: 16389067” is divided horizontally into sections depicting hell, earth and the blue skies of heaven. Because the largest newspaper images appeared in full-page advertisements, fashionably dressed women loom over the smaller infernal scenes of disaster and war. With colored pencils, Krimes has drawn in other female figures, who hover in the sky balletically but awkwardly, like Vivian Girls who escaped from a Henry Darger collage. Images of famous paintings, which ran in ads for museum exhibitions, are included in the mix.
Cut off from the world, Krimes depended on newspapers to grasp what was happening outside. He chose the title “Apokaluptein” because the Greek word denotes revelation or disclosure. And while the world is mediated for all of us, for prison inmates it is drastically filtered and skewed. In “Apokaluptein: 16389067,” cultural scenes come through as dimly as light into an oubliette, exposing what is celebrated and what is devalued in our society.
After his release from custody in 2014, Krimes became an activist for reform of the penal system and a supporter of those who have passed through it. In 2022, he founded a nonprofit, the Center for Art & Advocacy, to aid the artistic activities of former inmates. This fraternal camaraderie infuses his art.
For “Naxos” (2023-24), his most recent piece in the Met show, he asked inmates around the country to find an “ideal pebble” in the prison yard and send it to him. He then inked threads to match the color sequence of “Apokaluptein: 16389067” and used them to wrap and suspend nearly 10,000 stones, each from a needle. The two artworks are installed opposite each other. In a very subtle deconstruction, the colors of the imprinted bedsheets are reprised inch by inch in the dangling strings and stones of “Naxos.”
In Greek mythology, Naxos is the island where the hero Theseus abandoned Ariadne, who had betrayed her father, King Minos of Crete, by giving Theseus a ball of thread to find his way out of the Labyrinth after killing the Minotaur. The prison system is a bewildering maze like the Labyrinth, and the story captivates Krimes.
In “Jesse Krimes: Cells” at Jack Shainman Gallery, which presents works he made this year, one of the most striking pieces is a sculpture, “Minos and the Minotaur.” It combines a round wooden antique mousetrap as a kind of face with a skeletal body made of a surveyor’s tripod. A pebble hangs from a thread within the legs of the tripod, above a group of red-wrapped pebbles at the bottom. As in “Naxos,” the pebbles were donated by inmates, but you don’t need to know the back story of incarceration to shudder at the sculpture’s forbidding, predatory presence.
In another composition, “Ariadne’s Dancing Ground I-XIII,” wrapped pebbles appear again, this time as flowery finials at the ends of wavy concrete filaments, rising like lotus blooms out of the ground.
Most of the works in “Jesse Krimes: Cells” are wall pieces that Krimes constructed as palimpsests. He would transfer an image from art history, such as a detail of a “Hunt of the Unicorn” medieval tapestry at the Cloisters, and then overlay it with embroidery he made with clothing collected from inmates and former inmates.
He derived the design of the embroidery from microscopic images of flesh invaded by cancer cells, creating the pattern by removing the tumors from the pictures and leaving behind only healthy tissue. In a conversation, he explained that he wanted to suggest the possibility of redemption for those enmeshed in the prison network. However, you might just as easily interpret the altered images as glorifications of a penal system that has excised malignancies from the social fabric.
The embroidery in the wall pieces in “Cells” is so dense that the images beneath are hidden. The human beings in prisons are similarly out of sight, Krimes is saying, and so is the immense network of incarceration. But it is also the case that as Krimes’s still young career advances, often his messaging is likewise hidden, obscured by elaborate symbolism.
While the reformist fervor of the artist is unquestionable, frequently his work succeeds on aesthetic principles, not political ones. Maybe that is its own kind of triumph: a testament to his deep belief that art provides a path for the human spirit to rise above the degradation of prison.
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