Press release
Exhibition Dates: October 28, 2024–July 13, 2025
Exhibition Location: The Met Fifth Avenue, Joyce and Robert Menschel Hall for Modern Photography, Gallery 851
This is the first exhibition to feature Krimes’s two major installations, Purgatory (2009) and Apokaluptein:16389067 (2010–13), and they will be presented in dialogue with 19th-century photographs by the French criminologist Alphonse Bertillon
(New York, August 7, 2024)—This October, The Metropolitan Museum of Art will open the exhibition Jesse Krimes: Corrections that will explore the critical role photography has played in structuring systems of power in society, policing, prosecution, incarceration, and identification from the singular perspective of artist Jesse Krimes (American, born 1982). The exhibition will present three major immersive contemporary installations by Krimes alongside 19th-century photographs from The Met collection by the French criminologist Alphonse Bertillon, who developed the first modern system to target and identify people charged with crimes before the adoption of fingerprinting. A precursor of mug shots, this system was developed to combat rising rates of recidivism in 19th-century Paris by linking an alleged suspect’s anthropomorphic measurements with an identifying photograph. This exhibition marks the first time that Krimes’s two installations, Purgatory (2009) and Apokaluptein:16389067 (2010-13), created while serving a six-year prison sentence, will be shown together in their full iterations. Purgatory was acquired by the Museum in 2024. Jesse Krimes: Corrections will be on view October 28, 2024, through July 13, 2025.
The exhibition is made possible by Joyce Frank Menschel.
“This exhibition offers an important view into some of the complex histories that surround the powers and perceptions of incarceration,” said Max Hollein, The Met’s Marina Kellen French Director and Chief Executive Officer. “The presentation of Krimes’s remarkable reflections of his own lived experiences alongside Bertillon’s stark prints will surely serve as a catalyst for conversations about the significance of identity and the enduring impact of imagery.”
Shown alongside nearly 150 cartes de visite of suspected anarchists by Bertillon, Krimes’s monumental image-based installations present an opportunity to reconsider the perceived neutrality of our systems of identification and the hierarchies of social imbalance they create and reinscribe. The pairing underlines how Bertillon’s system contributed to the problematic ways in which these images dehumanize their subjects.
Lisa Sutcliffe, Curator in the Department of Photographs at The Met, said, “It is vital for collections that include photographs from the history of policing and criminology to consider perspectives from justice-involved individuals. In this exhibition, Krimes interrogates how the circulation of photographs in the media build on and reinforce structural hierarchies. Examining his work in dialogue with the system produced by Bertillon provides an opportunity to correct prejudices and biases in how we read photographs depending on the contexts in which they are presented.”
Krimes’s Purgatory and Apokaluptein:16389067 reflect the ingenuity of an artist working in a federal penitentiary without access to traditional materials. Purgatory transforms nearly 300 prison-issued soaps, playing cards, and newspapers into a work of art that seeks to disrupt and recontextualize the circulation of photographs in the media. Using a hand printing technique invented over the course of a year in solitary confinement, Krimes transferred faces of “offenders” from newspapers onto the surface of the wet soap. These portraits were placed into a hole cut into a deck of playing cards, replacing the faces of kings, queens, and jacks to critique and comment on the social and circumstantial influences of society and our ability to play the hands we are each dealt.
The second major work in the exhibition, Apokaluptein:16389067, is a 40-foot mural constructed of 39 bed sheets and made over the course of his final three years at the Fairton Federal Correctional Institution. The surreal landscape depicts heaven, earth, and hell through a collage of source material lifted from The New York Times over the period 2010–13. Fragmented and inverted, these headlines and stories draw the observer into the reality of Krimes’s lens and invite the viewer to experience the outside world through the artist’s incarcerated perspective.
Finally, the exhibition debuts Naxos (2024), an installation by Krimes that mirrors and deconstructs Apokaluptein and is composed of more than 9,000 pebbles gathered from prison yards and shared with the artist by incarcerated individuals around the country. Each hand-wrapped pebble is suspended from a needle and each individual thread pulled from recreated image transfers of Apokaluptien.
Jesse Krimes said, “I am excited to showcase these monumental works, created behind prison walls, in conversation with my new installation, Naxos, and Bertillon’s photographs. While Purgatory and Apokaluptein:16389067 reflect the mediated world outside of prison and its implication in forming societal value systems, Naxos disentangles these hierarchies and reaches back inside to pay homage to people still incarcerated. It is an absolute honor to have works that were created in such an austere and traumatic environment on display and in the collection at one of the world’s most prominent and prestigious cultural institutions. To show these works highlights much more than the work of an individual artist, namely the collective value, creativity, and dignity of the millions of people currently behind prison walls.”
Beyond his artistic practice, Krimes is the founder of The Center for Art and Advocacy (The Center), a nonprofit organization that supports formerly incarcerated artists and people directly impacted by the criminal legal system across the United States. Through funded fellowships, residencies, mentoring, and professional development, The Center works to empower the justice-impacted creative community to both challenge and change existing narratives around incarceration.
About the Artist
Jesse Krimes is a Philadelphia-based artist, curator, and advocate whose work explores how contemporary media shapes and reinforces societal mechanisms of power and control, with a particular focus on criminal and racial justice.
Shortly after graduating from Millersville University, Krimes was indicted by the U.S. government on drug charges. While serving a six-year prison sentence, he produced and smuggled out numerous bodies of work, established prison art programs, and co-created multiracial artist collectives. After his release, he founded The Center for Art and Advocacy, the first and only national fellowship dedicated to supporting formerly incarcerated artists, where he currently serves as Executive Director.
Krimes’s work has been exhibited at venues including MoMA PS1, Palais de Tokyo, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, International Red Cross Museum, Zimmerli Museum, Newport Art Museum, and Aperture Gallery. In 2016, he successfully led a class-action lawsuit against JPMorgan Chase for charging formerly incarcerated people predatory fees after their release from federal prison.
His curatorial practice is focused on elevating other system-impacted artists. In 2023, Krimes won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Art and Culture Documentary for ART & KRIMES BY KRIMES. He has also been awarded fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Creative Capital, Art for Justice Fund, Independence Foundation, and Vermont Studio Center. His work is in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum, Newport Art Museum, OZ Art NWA, Kadist Art Foundation, The Bunker Artspace, and the Agnes Gund Collection.
Jesse Krimes: Corrections is organized by Lisa Sutcliffe, Curator, Department of Photographs, The Met.
The Met will host a variety of exhibition-related educational and public programs, including community tours, a public talk with the artist, and a creative practice workshop, to be announced at a later date. There will also be digital content and articles to be published on The Met’s website throughout the exhibition.
The exhibition will also be featured on social media.
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August 7, 2024
Image: Jesse Krimes (American, b. 1982). Purgatory (detail), 2009. Soap, ink, playing cards, dimensions variable. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Purchase, Vital Projects Fund Inc. Gift, through Joyce and Robet Menschel, and Alfred Stieglitz Society Gifts, 2024 © Jesse Krimes
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