Quilt exhibit showcases artwork of inmate turned criminal justice activist

Transcript

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Amna Nawaz: Well, his work is now shown in major museums and galleries, but Jesse Krimes created some of his first artwork in prison.

Geoff Bennett: And following his release, he’s also become a strong advocate for the formerly incarcerated and for reforming the overall system of mass incarceration.

Senior arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown reports from Philadelphia for our Art in Action series exploring the role of art in democracy, which is part of our Canvas coverage.

Jeffrey Brown: A correctional facility in Philadelphia, a mural high on a city wall, a quilt hanging in a downtown museum, all with a common name, Riverside, and all connected by artist Jesse Krimes.

Jesse Krimes, Artist: The connection for me is — me personally, is how to be a conduit. How do I create things out in the world that can help amplify or make visible or create new narratives and ways of seeing and thinking for people who are quite literally hidden behind walls?

Jeffrey Brown: Well, they have been taken out of the community.

Jesse Krimes: Right.

Jeffrey Brown: At Philadelphia’s Fabric Workshop and Museum, Krimes’ latest exhibition is titled Elegy Quilts, from a series he began in 2020 during the pandemic. Each quilt is a kind of portrait of an incarcerated individual, but without the actual person, other than pieces of his her own clothing or bedsheets that were sent to Krimes.

Jesse Krimes: Up there, you can see the button from a shirt. And so this entire striped tree is actually from a button-up shirt that someone had given me.

Jeffrey Brown: Also missing, the prison. Instead, Krimes asked people to send them a favorite memory of home, an animal they love. He then created a scene and an absence.

You wanted us to see something other.

Jesse Krimes: Yes, because the viewer senses some kind of absence. Like, why are all of these empty chairs or empty beds or empty bathtubs or — and so you get a sense of that loss.

Jeffrey Brown: Krimes taught himself to sew and quilt specifically for the project. The goal, as with much of his work:

Jesse Krimes: Challenging just these kind of damaging, harmful narratives that have existed for a very long time around the stigma of people who happen to have made a mistake and end up behind prison walls, because, for me, some of the most amazing people I have ever met in my life were behind those walls.

Jeffrey Brown: Between 2001 and 2013, Krimes — and that is his real name — spent nearly eight years in state and federal prisons on nonviolent drug charges. An only child born to a 16-year-old single mother growing up in rural Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and often left alone, he says making things has always been a place of safety, something he could call his own.

Later, he would study at the Tyler School of Art and then Millersville University’s in Pennsylvania. But from his teens on, he was in and out of trouble, capped by a federal drug charge, and, while awaiting sentencing, nearly a year in solitary, punishment he says was meant to coerce him to give information on others, which he refused.

Jesse Krimes: Literally, every part of my identity out in the world has been removed. But I realized there was one thing that they couldn’t take from me, and that was my ability to create and actually make something that is mine. That gave me autonomy.

And so I just decided from that moment on that, no matter what kind of time I got as a sentence, I was going to use every minute and every hour of every day to make something positive in the world. And that was my artwork.

Jeffrey Brown: He made works that years later have been exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, altering materials at hand in prison. In Apokaluptein:16389067, his inmate number, he used bedsheets and hair gels, in Purgatory (2009), playing cards, prison-issued bars of soap and mug shots, creating piece by piece what he would later on the outside assemble into a large work.

Jesse Krimes: I started collecting the cards from the guys and I would buy them new decks of cards and take their old ones, and I would cut off the faces of the kings, jacks and queens and glue them together to create like a container that I would then house the soaps in, putting the mug shot of the offender where the royalty was and cover it up and put them in envelopes and kind of sneak them out of the prison.

Jeffrey Brown: You must have been a little surprised some years later that they were in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Jesse Krimes: I was quite surprised.

Jeffrey Brown: Released in 2014, Krimes has since combined his own art making with work on behalf of others, including the creation of the Center for Art and Advocacy in Brooklyn, New York, aimed at supporting and exhibiting formerly incarcerated artists, while also calling attention to what he sees as a brutal system of mass incarceration, one he says makes all of us less safe.

Jesse Krimes: We’re putting them behind prison not for rehabilitation, but for storage, often for decades, and then those people eventually get released and come back to the community.

And there’s no support systems, there’s no mental health, there’s no wellness, there’s no real programs, there’s no programs inside, there’s no real programs outside to support that transition, and you’re basically ensuring that you have future victims.

Jeffrey Brown: At 43, Krimes also continues to work with Mural Arts Philadelphia, a group dedicated to public art of all kinds, including arts programs inside and out of local correctional facilities. The Elegy Quilts exhibition features a series of small collages made by formerly incarcerated individuals who joined in workshops with Krimes, again prompted to think about places of comfort.

December Collins did that and more.

December Collins, Artist: I…

Jeffrey Brown: I see your name.

December Collins: Yes, December.

(Laughter)

December Collins: And…

Jeffrey Brown: You couldn’t resist?

December Collins: No, I couldn’t. It just popped out to me at the end of me cutting out pictures through magazines and all these things. But it was just more so, like, I felt like my life was just like a big old jumble of good and bad, shall I say. So I just felt like me being a centerpiece, and it created the space for who I was becoming.

Jeffrey Brown: For his part, Jesse Krimes took various images from the collages, including December’s, and put them into the quilt titled Riverside.

His own life experience, he says, continues to compel his art, as well as his advocacy. But I also asked about the victims of Krimes or their loved ones, who may not always get a second chance to turn around their lives.

What do you say to people like that?

Jesse Krimes: I don’t claim to have those answers. Everyone has the right to think and feel how they want on this issue. But for me personally, I want to have the space to heal, and I want to create the space for others to heal.

Jeffrey Brown: Jesse Krimes’ Elegy Quilts exhibition is on through November 1.

For the “PBS News Hour,” I’m Jeffrey Brown at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia.