An artist with Lancaster County connections is featured in an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.
Shortly after graduating from Millersville University in 2008, Jesse Krimes was arrested in Lancaster County on drug charges after being caught with $15,000 worth of cocaine, a scale, packaging material, a loaded handgun and ammunition.
While serving time for those crimes in a North Carolina prison, Krimes made a 40-foot mural by transferring newspaper images onto prison bed sheets with hair gel and a spoon. He mailed the work piecemeal to his girlfriend for safekeeping.
That piece, “Apokaluptein: 16389067,” and his installation “Purgatory,” which transformed nearly 300 prison-issued soaps, playing cards and newspapers, are featured in an exhibit, “Jesse Krimes: Corrections,” on display now at the Met in New York City. It’s the first exhibition to pair those two installations, and Krimes’ art is presented in dialogue with 19th-century photographs of suspected anarchists by French criminologist Alphonse Bertillon.
“The pairing underlines how Bertillon’s system contributed to the problematic ways in which these images dehumanize their subjects,” reads a description of the exhibition on the Met’s website.
Krimes, who is now based in Philadelphia, showed his work in Lancaster County in 2019. Cherry Crest Adventure Farm in Ronks hosted Krimes’ installation “Voices from the Heartland: Incarceration in Small and Rural America,” which included a corn maze and quilts. Piper Kerman, author of “Orange is the New Black” — her memoir on which the Netflix series of the same name is based — visited the “Voices from the Heartland” exhibit in September 2019.
“Jesse Krimes: Corrections” is on display now through July 13 in the Joyce and Robert Menschel Hall for Modern Photography at the Met. For more information, visit metmuseum.org.