Artist Jesse Krimes Lets His Materials Take Center Stage

Jesse Krimes vividly recalls the moment he chose to identify as an artist. During a year in solitary confinement, awaiting sentencing for non-violent drug-related charges, he had a life-defining realization: he would be an artist, no matter what.

“I decided very early on that I was going to use every minute of my time [in prison]—whether I got five years, twenty years, or a life sentence—to create something positive in the world,” Krimes recently told ARTnews. “Everything could be taken from me, except my ability to create.”

Prior to his indictment, Krimes had earned a BA in art from Millersville University in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where he developed a profound interest in conceptual art and a wide-ranging exploration of materials—an approach he continued to refine while serving a six-year prison sentence, and despite facing significant constraints to accessing traditional art materials.

Purgatory (2009), one of his most ambitious installations to date, was created while in solitary confinement by using hair gel and toothpaste to hand-transfer images of individuals labeled as offenders in newspapers onto 292 bars of prison-issued soap. The soap bars were then embedded into carved playing cards to examine an array of issues, including fate and the many failures of the American justice system. It serves as the centerpiece of Krimes’s current survey, “Corrections,” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (on view through July 13).

In the book Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration, author and curator Nicole R. Fleetwood reflects on the significance of the materials Krimes selected for Purgatory. “In his use of materials, Krimes references the notion of penitence, out of which the first penitentiaries emerged, and also the colonial and racist violence of the government mandating the use of soap by forcibly held captive and colonized peoples. Soap denotes a history of racializing pathologies and imperial and institutional ideas of cleanliness,” she wrote. 

At the Met, Purgatory is placed in conversation with a collection of mug shots of suspected anarchists taken by French police officer Alphonse Bertillon during the 1890s. The exhibition’s curator, Lisa Sutcliffe, said she admired the artist’s remarkable ability to creatively utilize the resources available to him while considering the deeper meanings they convey. “With [Krimes], every choice of material is prescribed,” she said.

His meticulous approach to materiality is further evidenced in Apokaluptein:16389067 (2010–13), another massive installation not far from Purgatory at the Met. Also completed by Krimes over three years during his incarceration, it is composed of 39 panels of diaphanous prison bedsheets, so thin they appear more like veils than bedding. Krimes worked an average of 12 hours each day on a makeshift desk crafted by fellow inmates from wood and porcelain tiles to complete the 40-foot wide mural. For each panel, the artist used hair gel and a spoon to transfer images from the New York Times onto the bedsheets, blending figures and filling in gaps with colored pencils to create a striking landscape that alludes to heaven, earth, and hell.

Though he had access to linen while at the Fairton Federal Correctional Institution in New Jersey, Krimes opted instead to use the sheets for Apokaluptein. This choice, he said, was paramount to the conceptual dimension of his work. “I wanted to use the materials of the prison against itself, because they’re produced in UNICOR, using prison labor,” Krimes explained. (UNICOR is a federal corporation where, as of 2021, minimum wage was established at $0.23 per hour with the highest paid position only reaching $1.15 per hour).

“In Apokaluptein:16389067 (2010–13), Krimes is thinking about hierarchies of power and the legacy of slavery,” Sutcliffe said. “Considering the conditions in which incarcerated people are expected to fabricate these bed sheets, working with these as a material was a clear choice to make that conversation a central part of the work.”

Krimes made another monumental installation, Naxos (2024), for the Met exhibition. Composed of more than 9,000 pebbles gathered from prison yards by Krimes and other numerous incarcerated individuals from around the country, Krimes has hand-wrapped and hung each pebble via individual threads that contain image transfers of Apokaluptien. “If you took the original Apokaluptien and pulled a thread out of it,” he said, “the exact color markings on that thread would be the same as the color markings that suspend the pebbles in Naxos.”

Krimes began collecting stones in the prison yard after reading a passage in Carl Jung’s The Undiscovered Self. “There was a quote about the average weight of a pebble,” he explained, “and how if you actually search for that pebble, you may never find it, and I thought that was such a beautiful way to capture uniqueness and individuality in comparison to systems and structures and how we actually build things.”

The wrapped pebbles that would later form Naxos started out from a process that Krimes said was “mostly meditative.” After his release, he relied on the support of countless incarcerated individuals to continue gathering stones and expanding the collection.

Because he didn’t initially know if or how the pebbles would form the basis of a larger work, Krimes described the process as organic and intuitive. “Sometimes I come across a material or an object, and I connect to it on a profound level, and I have no idea why, and then I sit with it until I figure out why,” he said.

Sutcliffe recalled seeing the dangling wrapped pebbles in Krimes’s studio and being “struck by their elegant simplicity,” she said. “They seemed to serve as stand-ins for individuals while collectively alluding to the idea of mass incarceration.”

The constraints of the carceral system surprisingly served as an important font of creative ingenuity for Krimes, so much so that “he struggled to make art after he was released from prison because the restrictive parameters of making art inside had fueled his creativity,” according to Fleetwood.

But Naxos illustrates just how Krimes emerged from that artistic struggle, returning to his belief in the power of materials to fulfill his vision. “A baseline for me is that whatever concept I’m trying to convey, or whatever idea I’m working through, I need the materials to be additive to that concept—they can’t just be arbitrary,” he said.