Jesse Krimes: Rikers Quilt

While I was in solitary confinement awaiting sentencing, where I eventually went into the federal prison system, I had very limited access to materials. I wanted to like, very specifically, use the materials of the prison against itself.

I originally made the quilt in 2020, which was obviously a pretty tumultuous time with COVID, and it was shortly after George Floyd had been murdered by the police that I decided to make that quilt.

It's comprised out of prison bed sheets, and it's made up of 3,650 individual quilt squares, and it's basically one square for each day of Mayor de Blasio’s 10-year timeline to close Rikers.

In the bottom left corner, you're seeing a depiction of the entrance sign that is outside of Rikers Island. The kind of corrections flag and the American flag are turned upside down, obviously, because I think this is a travesty of what we stand for as a country and who we are.

As you kind of move up the quilt and into the center, there are the idealized renderings of the new jails.

In the center of the quilt, you'll see signs after Kalief Browder, people who were protesting how violent this facility actually is.

The way that the Department of Corrections and the city of New York were depicting these kind of idealized jails and like people just kind of walking by, having a lovely time, passing by these beautiful facilities in the community, when the community itself is saying, “We don't want this. Rikers Island is racist. It is harmful. It's not something that is actually bettering our community.”

Underneath of that, you'll see a kind of emerging aerial shot of Rikers Island, which blends into the entrance sign as you enter the facility, which also kind of blends into the right on a depiction of someone who is held in solitary confinement with their hand coming out of the door.

As you move to the right from that door, it's an interior shot of one of the prison cells, so you see, like the metal toilet that is affixed to the wall.

[There’s] a person, I think it’s from an image in the New York Times? Where they were writing about the bread shop in Rikers Island. And so it's on the facilities where they would go to work. There's a sign in there that says, “Give us our daily bread.”

These are just all ways to kind of capture the hidden kind of labor and workforce that happens when people are incarcerated.

I added depictions of a calendar, just kind of like as a way to allude to the sense of time. And the other thing that I think does that is the repetition of the quilt squares themselves. The 3,650 squares just really captures the essence of time.

What you see up at the very top is these like gashes in the cold surface, and underneath there are depictions, again, of like violence and abuse that have happened on Rikers Island, and they're under every single quilt square, some are visible and some aren't.

The quilt was really kind of this almost grotesque advent calendar where it could be utilized in public space.