Solitary Resistance
Jesse Krimes was an artist before he was a prisoner. But in 2009, when Krimes— who studied studio art at Millersville University and is now an activist for prison reform—was indicted by the U.S. government for a nonviolent drug offense and sentenced to seventy months, his world was dramatically altered. Confined to a cell for twenty-three hours a day during his first year in prison, Krimes turned to art to cope. Until his release, in 2013, Krimes made clandestine works of art, often with ingenious methods of transferring photographic images from newspapers onto prison-issued bars of soap or sheets using hair gel purchased from the commissary, and sent them home, piece by piece, through the mail. Krimes’s monumental mural Apokaluptein:16389067 (2010–13)—the title derives from the Greek origin of the word apocalypse and Krimes’s Federal Bureau of Prisons identification number—considers heaven and hell through the collaged language of advertising and photojournalism.
Last fall, Krimes spoke with photographer and conceptual artist Hank Willis Thomas about how art can reveal the experiences of incarceration beyond the confines of American jails and prisons.
The prison-issued soap has this material language of purification and sanitization, which relates to ideas of the penitentiary and what it was designed to do.
Hank Willis Thomas: Over the past several years you’ve used
