The impulse to make art was so strong in Jesse Krimes that even behind the bars of a federal prison he found a way to create stunning works, often using prison bedsheets as his canvas.
“When you go into prison you quickly come to realize that everything that exists in your life can be taken, literally everything,” Krimes told Deadline. “But there are a few things that no one can take from you — unless you allow them to take it — and that is your dignity and your ability to create. And those were the two things that I just wasn’t willing to compromise.”
His story is told in the new film Art & Krimes by Krimes, from MTV Documentary Films, which played Tuesday night as part of Deadline’s virtual screening series For the Love of Docs. In a panel discussion afterwards, director-producer Alysa Nahmias explained that she found out about Krimes in 2013 through a blog called Prison Photography.
“I reached out to Jesse just kind of artist to artist,” said Nahmias, who worked as an architect before she became a filmmaker. “We just started a series of conversations and talking about what it might mean to tell his story in a documentary and to do so in a way that was collaborative and meaningful.”
Nahmias added, “Once Jesse introduced me to the other artists in the film, Jared [Owens] and Gilberto [Rivera] and Russell [Craig], I knew there was a bigger story that we could tell of shared experiences and the differences between them and the community that they were building as they came home.”
Krimes admitted to having some reservations about embarking on the documentary, describing himself as “prone to introversion.” But he managed to overcome that.
“By kind of swallowing my hesitation and just moving forward more with the process [I felt] it could really help shed some light on a lot of the issues that people face who are incarcerated and a lot of my friends who are actually still incarcerated,” Krimes said. “That weight of responsibility was something that really drove me to come out of my shell and really jump on board the project.”
As the film explores, Krimes was in his 20s when he was arrested on a cocaine possession charge and sentenced to six years in federal penitentiary. While incarcerated he secretly continued making art, in part by transferring newspaper photos onto prison soap squares, with the aid of hair gel and plastic spoons. He painted a 40-foot work onto panels of bedsheets, an opus he called “Apokaluptein: 16389067” (the number corresponded to his prison ID), and then got the panels snuck out of the prison to the outside world.
“Jesse’s work — I think what stood out to me is that it’s working subversively, like with the actual materials of the system while inside of it,” Nahmias observed. “I was really interested in – and working with Jesse about — showing what it’s like to be an individual in that system and create work that is critical of the system while inside.”
During the panel discussion, the film’s editor and co-writer Miranda Yousef spoke of how she found Krimes’ journey “very compelling.” Yousef noted, “Between Jesse’s willingness to make himself vulnerable and speak openly about his struggles and the challenges that he faced, and couple that with Alysa’s just lovely touch as a director — very insightful, very intelligent and very artistic herself — it just was a good combination for being able to turn a story that might just be shuffled off somebody’s desk… into really a personal story.”
Krimes grew up in Lancaster, Penn., raised by a single mom who had him when she was just 16. “It was basically a child raising a child,” he comments in the film. After his release from prison he co-founded the nonprofit Right of Return USA, “the first national fellowship dedicated to supporting formerly incarcerated artists.” Based in Philadelphia now, he has exhibited at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Palais de Tokyo and other prestigious venues. His work is part of the permanent collection of the Brooklyn Museum and other noted institutions.
He sees a dual purpose to the artworks he created behind bars.
“Both a mirror to reflect back to society what they are throwing away, and also a lot of the systems that are kind of perpetuating mass incarceration — but also a hammer,” he explained. “Simultaneously challenging people and really confronting people, even though I use aesthetic tropes of beauty to draw the viewer into very dark and brutal kind of content.”
Deadline’s For the Love of Docs series is presented by National Geographic. Watch the discussion of Art & Krimes by Krimes in the video above.