Jesse Krimes, a multimedia artist whose work explores societal mechanisms of power and control with a focus on criminal justice, has a new exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. “Jesse Krimes: Corrections” reflects the ingenuity of an artist determined to create despite a lack of access to traditional materials. Krimes produced numerous bodies of work using soap, hair gel, playing cards, and newspaper while serving a six-year prison sentence. The new exhibition at the Met shines a light on this important body of work.

The Justice-in-Education Initiative encourages all who are able to go see Krimes’s exhibition at The Met. The show is on now through July 13, 2025.

Columbia affiliates with a valid current CU/BC ID get free admission to the museum.

Official Press Release

Photography has played a key role in structuring systems of power in society, including those related to crime and punishment. This exhibition presents immersive contemporary installations by the artist Jesse Krimes (American, b. 1982) alongside nineteenth-century photographs from The Met collection by the French criminologist Alphonse Bertillon, who developed the first modern system of criminal identification before the adoption of fingerprinting.

Krimes’s image-based installations, made over the course of his six-year incarceration, reflect the ingenuity of an artist working without access to traditional materials. Employing prison-issued soap, hair gel, playing cards, and newspaper he created works of art that seek to disrupt and recontextualize the circulation of photographs in the media. Displayed at The Met in dialogue with Bertillon, whose pioneering method paired anthropomorphic measurements with photographs to produce the present-day mug shot, Krimes’s work raises questions about the perceived neutrality of our systems of identification and the hierarchies of social imbalance they create and reinscribe. An artist for whom collaboration and activism are vital, Krimes founded the Center for Art and Advocacy to highlight the talent and creative potential among individuals who have experienced incarceration and to support and improve outcomes for formerly incarcerated artists.

The exhibition is made possible by Joyce Frank Menschel.

More information on the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s website