Artist Jesse Krimes Changes the Narrative Around Incarceration 

The artist Jesse Krimes has a creative practice is rooted in lived experience—and in the belief that art can reshape our understanding of power, punishment, and identity. An artist, curator, and activist, he began making work while serving a six-year prison sentence, producing pieces that confronted the psychological and structural violence of incarceration. 

Krimes’s work has remained deeply autobiographical, shaped by an upbringing of instability, early encounters with the criminal legal system, and a hard-won relationship to education and self-definition. While in solitary confinement, stripped of every external marker of identity, he realized he was not a criminal, but an artist. That internal shift—paired with the limited materials inside prison, including soap, toothpaste, newspapers, and playing cards—sparked Purgatory, a work that interrogates how media constructs narratives of guilt and value, made mostly of prison-issued soap while he was actively incarcerated. 

Today, those same topics make up part of his career, spanning major institutional recognition, public-facing collaborations, and long-term advocacy—from Purgatory, the first work by a living, formerly incarcerated artist to be acquired by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, to “Corrections,” his ongoing partnership with The Prisoner Wine Company, which uses the wine label as a canvas for cultural change. The latter initiative by Jesse Krimes,” now in its fourth year, has evolved into a multi-year partnership that directly funds carceral work and amplifies conversations around mass incarceration beyond museums and galleries.

As founder and executive director of the Center for Art & Advocacy—the first national organization dedicated to supporting justice-impacted artists, founded in 2022—Jesse Krimes has helped build an ecosystem of fellowships, mentorship, exhibitions, and long-term career support. The Center’s current show, “Gilberto Rivera: Jailbirds,” on view through February 15, features new and recent work by Gilberto Rivera—a 2022 Center Fellow, whose practice is shaped by two decades of incarceration and the realities of subjugation beyond prison. 

From his studio in the Pennsylvania woods, Jesse Krimes shared with Whitewall details about his childhood, solitary confinement, identity formation, and the labor of rebuilding a life through art, and how creativity as survival hinges on storytelling, community, and advocacy.

Jesse Krimes: Pre-Prison

WHITEWALL: I’ve been interested in interviewing you for years, and of course, have questions about your creative practice, but what draws me to you is personal—both you and my mother were incarcerated. Too often, your darkest moments are normalized, but you’ve been able to make art in response to that, and it’s remarkable. But I know there are a lot of things that the prison system takes away from you, and you must still feel those effects. 

JESSE KRIMES: It’s an incredibly intense experience that has lingering effects for most people for most of their life. It’s a lot to go through and process, and try to find a center to heal from. It’s also something that I find very cathartic to talk about—to lessen the stigma of all of it and actually have honest conversations about what the system does to people. 

WW: Can you tell me a bit about your own mother, and how your childhood shaped you? Was art present in your life when you were growing up?

JK: My mother was 16 when she had me. Because of that, she dropped out of school and my biological father basically wanted nothing to do with me. I was growing up being raised by basically a child without another parental figure—a single mother at 16, working constantly, trying to make ends meet so that we had a place to stay. Being an only child in that kind of environment, creating and playing and making space was always something that I did as a solitary endeavor. That particular set of circumstances set the stage for me to hone my own kind of internal creativity because it’s how I occupied my time. It’s also the space where I felt the safest and most at peace with myself. 

So, from a very young age, I was always drawing or creating weird little cardboard dioramas. I was always making things. I did that through most of my life, and then there were other kinds of childhood traumas that occured as I got older. My mother’s boyfriend at the time started drinking, an d was an alcoholic, so eventually she left him. But growing up, I thought he was my father. I never knew that he was not my biological father until I was probably maybe nine or 10, at which point they were no longer together.

He struggled with alcoholism, and then eventually transitioned to doing heroin. He was wrapped up in addiction through most of my upbringing as well. Then, when I was around 13, he hung himself. Even though I knew he wasn’t my biological father, he was still very much my father. That had a profound impact on me. You don’t know how to process it or deal with it, particularly at that age. The thing that I referred to is smoking pot and drinking, self-medicating as a way to process this very traumatic event. That was my introduction to the criminal legal system. 

This big, traumatic event happened in my life, and rather than have teachers or people ask me, “Hey, what’s going on? Why are you acting out? Why are all these things happening?” I was met with police and prison. That early impact—early connection with police and getting arrested for disorderly conduct or possession, the things I was getting arrested for as a juvenile—started to inform my creative practice.

The way that I utilize my creative practice is very autobiographical. It’s a tool to process things that I was thinking about or feeling, and trying to make sense of the world around me and my position within the world. So, from a very young age, I was processing what it means to be good or bad and how you form an identity around that.

WW: How did that lead to you going to college? The financial burden of pursuing higher education in the United States can be cumbersome. 

JK: It is the one thing that my mother instilled in me—the importance of education. I think partially because she had to drop out of school so she could take care of me. She always made sure that I knew school, and getting good grades, was very important. Education was important. 

I knew how poor we were. Growing up, we had one room with no kitchen—no stove, no nothing. I didn’t even have a bedroom. Hearing her talk about the importance of education, and having had that experience growing up, I knew that education was the way to elevate myself out of this situation. School’s the one thing—even though I was making poor decisions, getting in trouble, and getting arrested—I always focused on. I always got good grades, I always did my homework first, and then I would go out and do my chaotic troublemaking after. 

It was ingrained in me. Initially, I got scholarships because I was a straight-A student, and was funded to go to Temple University, which is where I was accepted at the Tyler School of Art & Architecture. But I clearly hadn’t processed, in a healthy way, the things that I needed to. When I went, within six or eight months, I was arrested and ended up going to state prison for two-and-a-half to five years at the age of 18. 

I worked hard. I got some of the financial support, and then I could take out loans. Obligations were being met, but I wasn’t in a place to fully respect how important that was. When I came home from prison, I had obviously lost all my scholarships—all of the funding and support. 

So, I was in Philadelphia for school, went to state prison in Pennsylvania, came home to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and that’s where I started working for my grandfather in his machine shop. I would work during the day and then take a bus about an hour away to Millersville for night classes to get my credits back up so that I could apply to be full-time. I did that for maybe two years and started getting frustrated with not being able to survive, not being able to go to school. It felt like I needed to get an education if I wanted a life that was worth living. I went back to selling drugs to pay my way through school and ensured that I could dedicate my time and energy to getting an education. It was a long, arduous journey of finding myself and processing these things that impacted my self-worth, how I viewed myself and moved through the world. It took a very long time. 

WW: Did you feel a pull toward your professors? Did they inspire you?

JK: Even when I was in Millersville, I was lucky to have amazing professors. That was the moment when it started to take shape for me. My professors actually saw real value in me. Up until that point, no one had ever validated me in a positive, affirmative way. I was always a criminal or a troublemaker—the kid you’re supposed to not hang out with. When my professors started seeing real value in the work that I was making—the ideas and the concepts that I was exploring—it started to solidify that there’s something here that is important and meaningful for the world and for myself. By the time that solidified and I had graduated, I got indicted a couple of weeks after I graduated. I got raided by the Feds. I had all of my applications in, the top MFA programs in the country. I applied to Yale MFA and Bard MFA, and then got raided and ended up going into the federal system. That’s the story most people are familiar with, and where I usually start talking about solitary confinement and the process. It is the genesis for my current practice.

Entering the Carceral World

WW: What was it like being a college student and going to prison for the first time? 

JK: It was terrifying. It was my first time being incarcerated, going through a local jail. I wasn’t 18 before, for all my other arrests, so it was juvenile probation and all sorts of other things. Being 18 and going to jail, and then to a state prison, was definitely a big learning curve. I realized very quickly I had to build a particular set of armor if I wanted to survive and come out of this system on the other end intact. 

By the time I got indicted and I came home, I think I was 22. Then I went to Millersville in between and violated my supervision, so then they sent me back into state prison—and I maxed out my parole. I came back home, reenrolled at Millerersville, and then finally graduated. But by the time I had gotten to the federal system, I had already been through both local jails and state prison twice. I thought I was prepared, at least mentally, for what I was going to encounter in the feds, but it was a completely different system, a completely different set of rules, and a completely different level of people who they’re incarcerating. 

WW: Your practice, as you mentioned, is autobiographical, so that you can process and communicate what you’re going through, but feeling, too. How did prison shape the way you thought about your own identity? How did that inform what you wanted to make?

JK: It is really informative to not just who I am today, but also to my practice. Dealing with all of those issues throughout my life—encounters with the police, family issues, and not having a father figure—I didn’t have a reflective mirroring of how to be a man in the world. I ended up getting that through the media. 

I started to fill that hole of self-worth that was lacking through material things—having the nicest clothes, trying to get the nicest car. The things that made other people see me as valuable. That’s how I was constructing my identity, what’s being portrayed in the media—valuing this super high-end luxury thing that makes people very rare or exclusive. I was trying to build that, in a way. Looking back, I can see it now, but at the time, I didn’t recognize that was what I was doing. When they put me in solitary confinement for the first year, I had to do some really deep soul searching. 

When they took me from my house, they removed me from my family, my community. They put me in solitary confinement and took every material thing I had—every societal marker that you can possibly build. Everything that existed around my identity was taken. I realized very quickly that the one thing they couldn’t take from me was my ability to create. That was germinating.

It started to sprout when I was in college, and the value my professors saw in me. It crystallized and solidified for me when I was in prison, particularly in solitary confinement, because you’re stripped down to nothing. That was a profound shift for me because it was the first time in my life that I was able to say to myself, “You’re not a criminal, you’re an artist.” That internal shift in how I viewed myself was so powerful. It’s a positive way of viewing yourself versus the negative, which is what everyone was driving to place on me when I knew I was not a bad person. That was incredibly helpful. 

Even while I was in solitary, creating Purgatory, the work was about deconstructing identity formation through the media. How the media perpetuates different forms of identity, either who we’re supposed to view as valuable or who we’re supposed to view as disposable. My entire practice revolves around challenging and critiquing that mediated system of creating identity formation, because that was so impactful in how I was constructing my identity prior to being in prison the last time. 

Making “Purgatory” Behind Bars

WW: How did you make those works? Being in solitary confinement, you weren’t able to acquire much or hang onto items. So, how did you make them and get them out?

JK: I was originally looking at a 30-month sentence. When I refused to cooperate and tell on other people, they increased it with no evidence. They increased my drug weights from 140 grams of cocaine to 50 kilos. That increased my mandatory minimum guideline range from a 30-month sentence to ten-years-to-life. And because I had a prior offense, they could file my prior felony, and so then I was looking at a mandatory minimum of 20 years to life. 

That’s important because I was in solitary, processing all of those things— that the best case scenario was getting 20 years. Worst-case scenario, I’m getting life. So, I thought, what is the core part of me that is true to myself, that I can hold onto in this environment for the next 20 years or the rest of my life? How can I actually utilize this time to the best of my ability to create something positive in the world? 

That created a shift in my understanding. It also informed how I started my practice, and creating Purgatory, because you don’t have access to materials. They give out prison-issued bars of soap, which are terrible for you, and you can get a few other things, like a Walkman, playing cards, things to occupy your time… They were trying to keep people from going insane in solitary confinement. Your family can also get you a subscription to the local newspaper.

So, I was reading the papers. I had also read Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, so I had deep knowledge of the underpinnings of the prison system, and how it came into existence. Seeing the mug shots come up in the local papers every day, and seeing that image, reading the narrative that’s formed around a person at one particular point in time, that is then being captured and portrayed to the public, it connected to me to the ideas that Fucault was exploring, where when the church was the main source of power.

They would force everyone in the town to come out to the center to watch someone be beheaded—and that’s how they exerted their power over people, showing what they’re capable of doing for people who transgress their laws. I realized that we don’t do that anymore today. We’ve morphed into the prison system, but we still take mugshots, and the mugshots are a mediated form of decapitation. The heads are still being removed from the body through this process of photography. And then a narrative is formed. Rather than forcing people to come watch this decapitation, they capture it and then send it out to all of the people through these mediated outlets. 

And prison-issued soap is one of the very few materials you can have while you’re in solitary. The idea of soap connects to the ideas of repentance and cleansing and purification, which is the whole idea behind the penitentiary. It literally comes from the word “repentance.” The materiality of that soap captured what I was trying to convey with the removal of the mugshots and transferring them onto the surface of the soap. That’s the first piece that I made when I was in solitary, and consequently, it’s the piece that’s also on the label for the bottle. 

I took the batteries that you could order for your Walkman, and I would bust them open under the bunk of my cell and put deodorant labels around one end, and sharpen the other end on the cement floor. That’s how I was cutting all of the faces of the Jack, Queens, and Kings, then gluing the decks together with toothpaste. 

Doing the soap transfers, they’re very delicate, they’re very ephemeral, so I needed to figure out a way to house them and protect them as I mailed them out of the prison system, which is its own saga, because you can’t just mail them out. It’s contraband. I had to make friends with a trustee, who I would draw portraits of his kids for their birthdays, and he’d take my sealed envelopes and slip them in the mailbox outside in the hallway so that I could bypass the guards having to accept open envelopes and seal them themselves.

I decided then and there that no matter what, whether I can make a living at this or not, moving forward, I’m going to be an artist. There’s no plan B. I doubled down and spent every single minute, every hour of every day of every year that I was inside, creating. When I was released and I came home, I had a massive body of work made in a very rare environment. For people to actually make work and not have it confiscated… I came home with massive bodies of work that I had created, and I was lucky enough to get in contact with someone at Mural Arts of Philadelphia, who offered me a position in their guild program, which is a low-level assistant artist, but it was enough. It was transformational because it also connected me to an entire supportive community. 

All of that is because of the making—because I had something to point to, because I had an identity, because I was an artist. I came home with this coarse sense of who I was, and the visual remnants of that existence, as well, which then led to all of these opportunities. I’m also someone who is very strategic, and I think through what I’m making and how it connects to the world. I was able to get every opportunity, build something, and push it into something else. I knew that whether I was making money or a living doing this, that’s what I was going to be doing. 

“Purgatory” at The Met

WW: What does it feel like to see Purgatory at an institution like the Met?

JK: It feels simultaneously incredible and surreal, knowing that this work was made in the deepest, darkest depths of carcerole hell and now they are being shown in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art—a preeminent, visible, prestigious museum that shows what we value in this country. It feels incredibly powerful that this work that was made in the complete opposite—a place that’s designed to disappear people, to show what we deem as disposable. To have that work created in that environment in the permanent collection of the Met, and on display there, is a powerful signifier that this is actually valuable. 

This is really meaningful—not just for me as an artist, but for people who have been incarcerated. It helps validate all the ideas behind what I’m trying to do with my own work and the Center. These are serious, important issues, and we need to grapple with them in serious and important ways. It’s incredibly powerful to have institutional support because it signifies to the rest of the world that this is something we need to care about. 

WW: What does Purgatory‘s visibility—on view at the Met and on the label of Prisoner’s wine—mean to you? Your career as an artist?

JK: The show at the Met also coincided with my tenure anniversary of coming home, and that felt like a particular kind of moment for me personally, and then to have it kind of, like, to have a cat crystallized and kind of showcased at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, definitely felt like a historic moment—and to be the first living artist to enter into their collection. 

When they were considering acquiring the work, they invited me. I was the first artist in the entire history of the Met’s existence to be invited to present to their full board. I say that because this exhibition and the kind of visibility and amplification of the issues that it’s exploring has opened up some really old rusty gates. That’s incredibly valuable. The power of all of those things, of reaching new audiences and changing people’s perspectives, came at a really particular and profound moment for me.

These are issues we’ve been talking about for decades, and getting such institutional recognition and incredible brand recognition is engaging with the issue in ways that weren’t happening quite on the same level before. We’re able to kind of leverage this momentum and this moment, and direct it back to the Center, back to supporting other artists, back to building a bigger community, a broader ecosystem of support for people who are directly impacted through the lens of creativity. 

Inside the Center for Art & Advocacy

WW: In 2022, you also founded the Center for Art & Advocacy. Why did you want to create a center? What’s happening there today?

JK: When I first came home, there were no organizations that existed that were dedicated to funding and supporting people who had been through the crossworld system. All of the things that I had experienced, or had not experienced, because it didn’t exist, informed how we started the center. 

We started funding directly impacted artists in 2017. We’ve since grown into the Center, but our entire mission is: How do you use the tools of creativity across disciplines, not just physical art, but performance, poetry, writing, filmmaking? How do you support people who have direct experience with authentic voices, who are making work at the top tier level of their industry and fields already? How do you give them the support that they need? 

If you think about a lot of these artists, many of them have lost decades of their life behind bars. And we look at the Center as, how do we take away all of the barriers that are in place to help them thrive in their practice? 

The belief is that if we can support people who are already creatively brilliant, they then go out into the world, and be the best advocates we have because they’re creating amazing work, they’re engaging people, they’re building community. Our work at the Center is: How do we best support them through funded fellowships, through mentorship, through industry connections? 

We’re also building a residency program so that they can explore new materials and processes. We opened a new gallery space in Brooklyn, which is a wonderful way to showcase our artists to the world. Because again, we fund artists all across the country. Some of them are outside of the epicenters of the art world or film world. The new space is a way to bring someone from Tennessee to have a show in Brooklyn. Then we can get curators and collectors and people to come out and see their work and actually engage with them. The center’s mission is to figure out a way to change public narratives and support people who are directly impacted in whatever ways they need support to thrive.

WW: In addition to creating art and running the Center, you also collaborate with brands, create partnerships, attend many art and culture events, and more. How does that shape your career as an artist?

JK: It is a natural progression in building a career, building a practice, gaining more visibility, and not just for myself and my own career, but also founding the Center for Art and Advocacy, funding other directly impacted artists. 

I have my own anecdotal story of what going through the system was like, but it’s not the typical experience, because the system predominantly preys on Black and Brown people. That was very apparent to me. Creating the Center, supporting other artists and  leveraging opportunities was all part of my practice. When the opportunity came up to partner with The Prisoner, which is an amazing wine brand, it was a no-brainer for me, because at the core of our mission at the Center, and my mission as an individual, is how to create or change public narratives around issues of incarceration.

Being able to work with this top-tier brand and get the work into the world to people who typically may not come to a museum or a gallery show was an incredible opportunity. They’ve been an incredible partner in doing that—and not just creating that label. In addition to getting the word out, trying to use this label as advocacy and change narratives, they’ve also directly funded the Center, giving $75,000 for the second year in a row. They also give five percent of all of the sales of the bottle to the Center, and three percent of red blend sales. 

When you have a partner like The Prisoner, it’s much more than just doing this label. It’s very integrated into the community with funding, opportunities, visibility, and connecting people to a community. It goes well past the financial aspects. It builds an entire ecosystem of support for people, which is what we’re trying to do at the Center. It’s very mission-aligned.