
Jesse Krimes
Paths to Paradise
by Jonathan Goodman, January 22, 2025
Jesse Krimes: Corrections at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, on view October 28, 2024–July13, 2025. Image: © The Metropolitan Museum ofArt, photo by Hyla Skopitz.
The artist Jesse Krimes, who was indicted by the U.S. government on drug charges shortly after graduating from Millersville University, is currently holding a small show in the photography section of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Jesse Krimes: Corrections.
Krimes has reached high recognition while still in his middle years. It looked like art changed his life course; photos and low-relief paintings are more than they seem, being, in ways hard to see, referents to his stay in jail. Often there are stories of gifted people being incarcerated and then moving, successfully, into art. Krimes is particularly strong among this group of artists who have spent time in prison; his highly sensitive work is given to details that do not necessarily refer to the details of imprisonment. The artist’s wall reliefs, sometimes incorporating small sculptural elements such as shells, look like a pathway out of an imaginative prison reconstruction. Or, perhaps more importantly, building an architecture intended to qualify as an alternative to incarceration. The works can be read as imagined acts of freedom, seen as near-private visions of someone once stuck behind bars.
But if it is true that some of the work by Krimes feels whimsical (a challenging adjective for someone who served in prison), perhaps the sensitivities found in Krimes’s work have to do with a preference for a life free of the severity that must occur behind bars.
There is a wall of vintage playing cards on display, along with soap bars bearing the image of individual prisoners; these cards, in no way damaged or changed, easily might serve as a representation of the difficult time spent in a cell. But it is also possible that these works by Krimes, include images nearly hopeless in the artist’s reliance on chance and the knowledge that he had been incarcerated for some time (six years). The combination of deliberate beauty with touches of darkness makes Krimes’s world more complex than it would seem from the work alone. The show is an occasion for art that does not support art alone.
Much of the work is minimal in outlook. And the materials are instances of Arte Povera. Twentieth-century architect Mies van Rohe’s dictum “Less is more.” Krimes looks for large considerations he can work freedom and lyricism immediately comes to mind. But his materials, usually spare and poor, align with a life that has had its difficulties. Perhaps his real theme has to do with the survival of lyricism in the face of fate–of a not particularly comfortable kind.

Jesse Krimes (American, born 1982) Apokaluptein:16389067 2010–2013 Cotton sheets, ink, hair gel, graphite, gouache Overall: 15 x 40 ft (4.6 x 12.2 m) Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery © Jesse Krimes
If we look at the beautiful wall-size mural called Apokaluptein:16389067 (2010-2013), we see Krimes at his strongest. It consists of a pale blue-white sky above a large collection of pictures, involving such images as people seeming to float in the lower levels of the upper blue sky. Beneath them are scores of photographs that address all manner of subjects, ranging from people to nature to architecture. Concerned with relatively conventional objects for study, animals such as leopards, and usually nondescript buildings, these images form a mosaic of an untroubled life enjoyed by people generally—rather than the specialized hardship of the convicted. The robin egg’s blue of the sky seems like a mirror of pleasant opportunities as well. Seeing the pieces is like taking a walk into the complexities and possibilities of the world.
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Across from the mural blue-sky-unusual-photograph painting, there is a wall piece that faces Krimes’s blue sky and a lower series of photos piece—in the work I am describing, a series of 10,000 pebbles hang in front of a flat wall made up of poker cards. Their relations, clearly determined by Krimes himself, speak of great numbers, just barely countable, and the poker cards, likely often played in jail, act out a visual metaphor for luck and fate. Perhaps the long sequence in bleeds refers to Krimes’s sentence, and perhaps the beads are meant to suggest the artist’s stay behind bars.
We could say that Krimes’s incarceration was tragic, but maybe that is missing the point. Krimes uses the title “Corrections” which is the show’s primary point. A sense of punishment is always there—even if it is only based on the intellectual knowledge of the artist’s life. But, in his works large and small, Krimes does an amazing thing: he trades the negative associations for something new—and visionary positive. It might even be suggested that the duration of Krimes’s jail time became a window allowing him to work and make his mark despite the conditions of a criminal sentence. In this way, Krimes transformed his highly difficult conditions into images and objects of unusual beauty. We must recognize his determination and imaginative skill.

Jesse Krimes (American, b. 1982) Purgatory( detail) 2009, Soap, ink, playing cards Variable dimensionsThe Metropolitan Museum of Art,New York, Purchase, Vital Projects Fund Inc. Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, and Alfred Stieglitz Society Gifts, 2024 (2024.327.1–.291) © Jesse Krimes