Jesse Krimes had to smuggle his art out of prison. Now it’s in the Met’s permanent collection.

Artist Jesse Krimes remembers the despair he felt every time he was forced to stand for a mug shot. Each time, he stared down the lens with a mixture of disgust, defiance, and dejection.

“My image was being captured at perhaps one of the lowest moments in my life,” Krimes said. “It’s like you’re almost performing criminality for the photographer, as like a protective measure. As a way of putting armor on, knowing that you’re going into this very traumatizing, dangerous situation.”

From 2009-10, before his trial on drug possession charges, Krimes spent a year in solitary confinement at South Jersey’s Fairton Federal Correctional Institution with most of his information about the outside world coming only from newspapers. In the pages of the New York Times, he saw hundreds of mug shots and recognized the expressions glaring back at him. People like him, memorialized on the worst days of their lives, showcased in the media as disposable. As threats.

Krimes started collecting the images — mug shots and head shots of politicians and celebrities, 300 in all — and transferred them onto small pieces of prison-issued soap. It was a methodical practice akin to purifying, recasting the photographs in a new context by “removing them from these damaging narratives and almost cleansing, or repurposing, them,” he said.

The artwork that emerged, called Purgatory (2009), was smuggled out of prison piece by piece, each soap portrait hidden in stacks of playing cards cut into tiny frames using a tool he made from a deconstructed battery. In place of kings and queens were these “offenders.”

Today, 16 years later, their faded faces adorn the prestigious halls of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. The institution acquired Purgatory in 2024; it’s the Met’s first acquisition of a work by a living artist who was previously incarcerated.

After Krimes left prison in 2013, his artistic career blossomed. The Philly-based artist became a major advocate supporting formerly incarcerated artists committed to racial justice and ending mass incarceration. In 2023, Lisa Sutcliffe, a curator of photography at the Met, approached him about a potential exhibit.

“Jesse Krimes: Corrections,” running through July 13, puts Purgatory face to face with 19th-century photographs by French criminologist Alphonse Bertillon, known as the inventor of the modern mug shot.

The black-and-white images capture alleged anarchists, most of them mustachioed men, from journalists to restaurateurs, convicted of pick-pocketing, petty theft, and bombings.

Sutcliffe said she immediately saw the potential of putting Krimes’ work alongside historic images of Bertillon’s early mug shots.

“It’s really important for institutions that house collections of art to think about how they can be a resource for people who are returning from prison, not just artists, because they are places of contemplation,” said Sutcliffe, who hopes to see the Met continue to work with artists impacted by the justice system.

“They’re places that help to platform conversations that can be more difficult, and the Met can be a really great resource for reminding people of their own humanity and the humanity of those for whom that has been taken away.”

“Corrections” includes Krimes’ massive mural Apokaluptein:16389067 (referencing his Federal Bureau of Prisons identification number), made on 39 contraband bed sheets that he also smuggled out of prison in parts. It’s displayed across the room from a newly created counterpart called Naxos.

Similar to Purgatory, Krimes created Apokaluptein by transferring newspaper images using hair gel, over the course of three years. The result is an overwhelming illustration of heaven, earth, and hell as a meditation on capitalism, commercialism, and media coverage.

On the opposite wall, the 40-by-15-foot Naxos serves as a deconstructed mirror to Apokaluptein. Roughly 10,000 pebbles hover, hanging from thin strings — threads tugged from a copy of Apokaluptein — that sway almost imperceptibly. Krimes was inspired by 20th-century Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, who used an analogy about pebbles to caution against reducing people to statistics: One could find the average weight of thousands of pebbles and still fail to find an “ideal” pebble of that exact weight.

Krimes asked incarcerated people to send him what they believed was an ideal pebble from prison yards across the country. The large scale symbolizes the weight of mass incarceration.

“Naxos talks about averages and ideals and how those things don’t actually capture the uniqueness of an individual or an identity or a person,” said Krimes. “That pebble becomes like a symbolic representation of that individual.”

Krimes’ revisionist crusade through art extends beyond “Corrections.” While Purgatory and Apokaluptein are fragmented by design, his newer pieces, evident from “Cells,” a recent show at New York’s Jack Shainman Gallery, are seemingly a means to consolidate and cleanse.

Unicorn (2024), the 8-foot high by 26-foot wide centerpiece, is a weblike network built with used clothing Krimes collected from people currently or formerly incarcerated. Using his classic style of layered images, this embroidered piece spreads across transferred images of animals from the canon of art history, depicted as caged or in the act of being hunted. Enmeshed among several of such references is Hunt of the Unicorn, the medieval tapestry series displayed in the Met Cloisters.

“It’s this idea of this magical, mythical creature whose horn can purify water, and a bunch of men just want to go out and kill it. There’s this punitive urge to kill the unicorn. [Unicorn] captures this essence of what punitive ideology is and how it’s just so enmeshed in our culture,” Krimes said.

The pattern of Krimes’ embroidered web of clothes mimics the patterns seen in microscopic images of organs infected by cancer. Only in Krimes’ art, the malignant tumors have been removed and the lines of the clothes diverge and commune to form patterns of healthy cells, resolutely liberating and charging forth with a will to cure.

“There’s something really powerful about the images of these animals that capture this idea of resistance and power and strength in opposition to these harmful, punitive approaches. Even if they’re obscured or oppressed or hunted, they just are always overcoming these restrictions,” he said.

His new work, much like the Rikers Quilt and other earlier work, is a celebration of “the resilience and resistance of people who find themselves on the pointed end of” society’s urge to continually punish and torture.

The sculptural forms of Minos and the Minotaur, Theseus’ Throne, Ariadne’s Dancing Ground I - XIII move away from the flatness of Krimes’ quilts and wall pieces. Using pebbles collected from incarcerated people, like in Naxos, Krimes reimagines the myth of Theseus slaying the monster in King Minos’ labyrinth with the help of Minos’ daughter, Ariadne.

Theseus ties one end of a ball of string Ariadne gave him to the labyrinth’s door as he proceeds to slay the monster Minotaur, moving forward and downward, and never turning left or right. Once he slays the monster, he finds his way out following the path of the string, and liberates Athenians from the tyranny of Minos.

Krimes’ works are spectacles — often overwhelming in their scale and shape, with layer upon layer of meaning, references, and images. Burrowing through it all, Krimes is quietly unraveling his ball of string, chalking a neural network of roads built with the life and blood of those the society relegates to its borders.

The world is full of cages and the only way out, Krimes knows, is through this circuitous web of thread that may look fragile but will ultimately liberate everyone in its wake.

“Jesse Krimes: Corrections.” Through July 13. The Met Fifth Avenue, 1000 Fifth Ave., New York. metmuseum.org/exhibitions/jesse-krimes-corrections