Jesse Krimes
American artist and curator (born 1982)
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Jesse Krimes (born 1982 in Lancaster, Pennsylvania) is an American visual artist and curator, who focuses on criminal injustice and contemporary perceptions of criminality.
Career
In 2009, after graduating from Millersville University, Krimes was arrested for cocaine possession. While awaiting sentencing for possession of cocaine with intent to distribute, he spent a year in solitary confinement. It was during this time that Krimes decided "to create something positive in the world”.
"Everything could be taken from me, except my ability to create"
During this time, he devised a way 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 the failures of the American justice system. He then shipped them discreetly out of prison. This ultimately became Purgatory (2009), which was on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Purgatory, along with other works by Krimes, was exhibited at the Museum in Jesse Krimes: Corrections; the exhibit paired Krimes' work with "...nineteenth-century photographs from The Met collection by the French criminologist Alphonse Bertillon, who developed the first modern system of criminal identification before the adoption of fingerprinting."
He was sentenced to six years in prison, and subsequently served five years. In his last three years of his sentence, he was able to gain access to art supplies and was able to produce numerous pieces and mentor others.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q64748318. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1982 and 2009.
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This entry incorporates text from “Jesse Krimes” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.