Discussion and Q&A with artists and filmmaker will take place immediately following the screening. 

While locked up for six years in federal prison, artist Jesse Krimes secretly creates monumental works of art—including an astonishing 40-foot mural made with prison bed sheets, hair gel, and newspaper. He smuggles out each panel piece-by-piece with the help of fellow artists, only seeing the mural in totality upon coming home. As Jesse’s work captures the art world’s attention, he struggles to adjust to life outside, living with the threat that any misstep will trigger a life sentence.While locked up for six years in federal prison, artist Jesse Krimes secretly creates monumental works of art—including an astonishing 40-foot mural made with prison bed sheets, hair gel, and newspaper. He smuggles out each panel piece-by-piece with the help of fellow artists, only seeing the mural in totality upon coming home. As Jesse’s work captures the art world’s attention, he struggles to adjust to life outside, living with the threat that any misstep will trigger a life sentence.

ARTISTS:

Jesse Krimes is a Philadelphia based artist and curator, and the co-founder of Right of Return USA, the first national fellowship dedicated to supporting formerly incarcerated artists. While serving a six-year prison sentence, Krimes produced and smuggled out numerous bodies of work exploring how contemporary media shapes or reinforces societal mechanisms of power and control.

Russell Craig is a self-taught Philadelphia-based artist. Craig is the co-founder of Right of Return, USA, the first national fellowship dedicated to supporting formerly incarcerated artists. Craig’s work is a part of the Brooklyn Museum’s permanent collection and has been featured in institutional exhibitions including Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration at MoMA PS1.

Jared Owens is an abstract conceptual artist currently based in New York, NY. Owens’s art career began as a self-taught portrait artist ten years ago in federal prison. Because of the monotony of portraiture, Owens turned to the less confined, organic nature of non-objective art and he currently works in a variety of media including acrylic, oil, and reclaimed materials.

Gilberto Rivera’s is an abstract painter and conceptual artist whose new work is shaped by the time he spent in a place where he couldn’t get traditional supplies. His work has been featured in MoMA PS1 in Queens, NY as part of the exhibit “Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration.”

Watch the film trailer here.

Still from the feature documentary Art & Krimes by Krimes directed by Alysa Nahmias. An AJNA Films production. Courtesy of MTV Documentary Films.

If you need a disability-related accommodation or wheelchair access information, please contact Ileana Tejada at itejada@stanford.edu. Requests should be made by February 9.