Cyrus Dunham
In the artist’s exhibition at the Met, a corrective to the objects and systems of the carceral state.
Jesse Krimes: Corrections, installation view. Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: Hyla Skopitz. © Metropolitan Museum of Art. Pictured, center, on wall: Alphonse Bertillon, Mugshots of Suspected Anarchists, from French Police Files, 1891–95.
Jesse Krimes: Corrections, organized by Lisa Sutcliffe, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, New York City, through July 13, 2025
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The term “House of Corrections” first appeared in writing at the end of the sixteenth century, as England began to formalize its penitentiary system. To “correct” meant to straighten out, rectify an error, or improve upon something. “Corrections,” as an institutional prerogative, was the progression of a familiar concept: people went to the house of corrections to be fixed.
Corrections, the title of Jesse Krimes’s current exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is a double entendre: a reference to the Department(s) of Corrections that incarcerated Krimes from 2009 to 2014 (and continues to imprison millions of other Americans), as well as the physical corrections that Krimes makes on objects. Both forms of correction—capital and lowercase—create the conditions for his sculptural, pictorial, and conceptual practice.
Jesse Krimes: Corrections, installation view. Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: Hyla Skopitz. © Metropolitan Museum of Art. Pictured: Purgatory, 2009.
In Purgatory (2009), the earliest work on view, there are five blue-lacquered shelves, each displaying thirty-seven stacked decks of playing cards, the whole behind glass. Every deck is altered with a window-shaped cutout. Some of these windows reveal the suits, numbers, or faces of different cards; other windows reveal off-white surfaces, printed with nearly illegible pictures. In between the rows of cards, smaller shelves of the same dark blue display white domino-size rectangles. The wall text informs us that these dominos are bars of prison-issued soap, and that they serve as inserts in many of the cutouts. Laboring clandestinely in his cell, Krimes had printed images from newspapers and magazines onto the soap, beginning with mugshots from local crime sections and moving on to tabloid shots of famous people. The soap bars invigorate the decks with further meaning: pictures of the accused replace kings and queens; supermodels and presidents animate the deck’s lowest numbers. All of the portraits have faded over time, rendering the subjects—and their varying degrees of criminality and prominence—virtually indistinguishable from one another.
Jesse Krimes: Corrections, installation view. Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: Hyla Skopitz. © Metropolitan Museum of Art. Pictured: Purgatory, 2009 (detail).
Krimes made Purgatory during his first year of incarceration, which he spent in pretrial administrative segregation—otherwise known as solitary confinement. Studying the cards, I found myself thinking about the significance of the rectangle in the prison’s architecture of control. Modern penitentiaries are generally designed in standardized grids of six-by-eight-foot cells, separated by hallways. Cells are approximately the same rectangular ratio as the standard 2.5-by-3.5-inch playing card. The window in the wall, the hole in the floor, the cut in the cards—these are pathways of escape, now mostly in folklore, as militarized security and high-tech surveillance make prison-breaks all but impossible.
Jesse Krimes: Corrections, installation view. Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: Hyla Skopitz. © Metropolitan Museum of Art. Pictured: Purgatory, 2009 (detail).
Limited by regulations on time, movement, and materials, Krimes realized he could hide the soap bars in card decks to prevent them from being ascertained by prison authorities. He mailed the decks out of the institution two at a time, in standard white envelopes. We glean, then, that Purgatory’s current display is a distortion of the original work, which was defined as much by temporal constraints as material ones. The original revealed itself in sequence through a process that first began with the sender, then required each letter to pass inspection by the jail’s internal processing department, depended on the United States Postal Service for transportation, and finally reached completion upon delivery to the addressee. Postmarked envelopes are shown in a vitrine in the gallery. Did the museum choose to include it as an explanatory accessory, a kind of anthropological, carceral ephemera? Or is the envelope a work unto itself, a remnant of Krimes’s process-based practice? This tension—between institutional contextualization and artistic agency—is a recurring problem throughout the show.
Alphonse Bertillon, Biais. Fernand, Alphonse. 41 ans, né le 28/6/53 à Laval (Mayenne). Tourneur sur bois., 1894. Albumen silver print from glass negative, 4 1/8 × 2 3/4 inches.
Myriad theorists have demonstrated how the warehousing of bodies and the display of precious objects are co-arising and inseparable historical phenomena. If museums developed to clarify a society’s sense of what was valuable, then prisons inversely marked, and disappeared, lives seen as possessing little value. This connection is manifest in Krimes’s exhibition. Purgatory shares a room with numerous images from the Met’s photography collection, mostly by Alphonse Bertillon, the nineteenth-century French criminologist widely credited with inventing, and standardizing, the mugshot. Mugshots of Suspected Anarchists (1891–95) arranges card-size gelatin silver portraits in a grid similar to that of Purgatory. Some of the suspected anarchists look directly into the camera, while others stare blankly toward a sideways or diagonal horizon. Although these men and women appear strikingly modern, they were participating in a genre still creating itself. Bertillon’s anarchists might never have otherwise posed for a photograph of any kind. Did they understand, as we do now, that this moment of exposure—both photographic and regulatory—was unlikely to be erased?
Jesse Krimes: Corrections, installation view. Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: Hyla Skopitz. © Metropolitan Museum of Art. Pictured, left, on wall: Apokaluptein:16389067, 2010–13.
In the second gallery, Krimes’s largest work, Apokaluptein:16389067 (2010–13), is almost medieval in scale and theme. Divided into three horizontal realms—heaven, earth, and hell—Apokaluptein depicts a world in which diplomats and actresses are subsumed by faceless throngs of refugees displaced by environmental disasters. The exhibition’s wall texts repeatedly mention that many of the artist’s materials are “prison-issued,” and Apokaluptein is no exception. He constructed the massive piece by using hair gel to transfer images from the New York Times onto prison-issued white cotton sheets, sending each out upon completion. In Apokaluptein’s blue sky, there are a few giants: svelte, sinewy, and perfectly proportioned naked white women pirouetting and flying across the clouds. These looming female figures unmistakably invoke the hand-drawn porn that often circulates in prisons. Except many of the women possess the heads of world leaders, sewing a Frankenstein eroticism out of contraband porn and political gatekeeping.
Jesse Krimes: Corrections, installation view. Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: Hyla Skopitz. © Metropolitan Museum of Art. Pictured: Apokaluptein:16389067, 2010–13 (detail).
Like the playing-card envelope, Krimes’s pencil-on-paper blueprint of Apokaluptein is displayed in a glass box next to sample newspaper clippings. I got the sense the Met was engaged in an evidentiary practice. Hesitant to let the art speak for itself, vitrines and didactics offer proof of Krimes’s carceral conditions. There is, for me, a palpable disjunction between the artwork and its display, between the artist and the museum. The former: an agent of subtle, conceptual work, wherein process, constraint, and material are inseparable, imagery illustrative without being allegorical. The latter: an institution engaged in a practice of apologetics, hyper-literal in its interpretations of incarceration and its creative delimitations.
Jesse Krimes: Corrections, installation view. Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: Hyla Skopitz. © Metropolitan Museum of Art. Pictured: Naxos, 2023–24.
In Naxos (2023–24), nearly ten-thousand pebbles dangle from pins on a massive white canvas. From afar, the rocks look like brightly colored crystals. Up close, they reveal themselves as more proletarian gray and brown granite, even chunks of concrete. Each is suspended by a colored string, wrapped around it like a corset. Again, the work’s narrative force is explained by the wall text. Krimes created Naxos after his release, asking thousands of incarcerated people to select “the ideal pebble” in their prison yards and to send them to him by mail. This piece gestures toward collective authorship (each rock is unique, as is each individual), and yet the pebbles, like their selectors—like Bertillon’s suspected anarchists—remain anonymous.
Jesse Krimes: Corrections, installation view. Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: Hyla Skopitz. © Metropolitan Museum of Art. Pictured: Naxos, 2023–24 (detail).
While incarcerated, Krimes covertly made Purgatory and Apokaluptein:16389067, sending them “outside” to be assembled in their totality. After his release, he reached back “inside” to assemble Naxos. Every artwork in Corrections breaches the wall between inside and outside, prison and freedom, rendering a carceral landscape both vast and permeable. Now, Krimes’s work is on display in a different kind of institution—one with its own subtle history of capture, constraint, and regulation.
Cyrus Dunham is the author of A Year Without a Name, a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. His writing has appeared in publications including the New Yorker, Granta, and the Intercept, among others. He is a Dornsife Fellow in Nonfiction at the University of Southern California.