Artist Jesse Krimes’s Struggle to Overcome Years in Prison Showcased in New Documentary
ARTNews, November 26, 2021: Artist Jesse Krimes’s Struggle to Overcome Years in Prison Showcased in New Documentary
“In the documentary Krimes, artist Jesse Krimes espouses a provocative theory: many of the U.S.’s greatest artists are unknown, and not simply because curators and dealers haven’t taken the time to find them. “One in three people has a criminal record, so that is a clear signal to me that there is a whole pool of wasted talent, not just in the prison system, but also with the people who come home,” he says. According to Krimes, some of today’s finest painters and sculptors are still incarcerated. We just haven’t heard about them yet.
Krimes would know a thing or two about this. Last summer, he became one of the breakout stars of Nicole Fleetwood’s MoMA PS1 exhibition “Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration,” where he was one of many formerly incarcerated artists with art on view. “Marking Time” was an exhibition quite unlike many others before it, and it came as part of a relatively new emphasis being placed on the U.S. prison system within the art world. Back in 2017, collector Agnes Gund sold a $160 million Roy Lichtenstein painting to launch Art for Justice, an organization dedicated toward funding projects about the carceral system; earlier this year, the memoirs of late artist Winfred Rembert, who was imprisoned for seven years, were put out by Bloomsbury, a mainstream publishing house. (Rembert is currently the subject of a career retrospective at the New York–based gallery Fort Gansevoort.)”
Additional reading:
TEDx Philadelphia, February 9, 2016: Jesse Krimes: How art and prison let us understand life’s complexities
