Being in solitary confinement and looking at the possibility of spending the rest of my life in prison, I had to do some very, very deep soul-searching.

That was one of the most powerful moments in my life.

I'm an artist.

That's who I am.

♪♪♪ Hello, I'm Jesse Krimes, and this is how art changed me.

It's funny because on my drive up here, I passed this, um, New Jersey Department of Corrections van, and it really made me remember sitting in the back of that, like, cold, cavernous metal van shackled from my wrist to my waist to my feet to the van, and just, like, feeling completely isolated and alone and seeing the cars on the highway just fly by you and no one gives... no one has any thought or real concern about who is in this van or what this van is encapsulating.

I think that's what life would be like if art were not in it.

I went to college for art, ended up graduating from, uh, the university with my bachelor's in art.

Shortly, like two or three weeks after that, I got indicted by the federal government and, um, went into the federal prison system.

The government was basically able to take everything from me.

They removed me from my house.

They removed me from my family.

They took all of my clothing.

Every kind of societal marker of identity could be -- could be taken.

It was something that was not core to me or mine.

But I realized very quickly that the one thing that was core to me was my ability to create, and that I am an artist, and that that is the one thing in this world that no one can take from me.

That was when I knew that no matter how much time I was looking at, whether it was five years, 10 years, 20 years, life, that I was going to utilize this time in the most productive, powerful way that I could.

And so when I was in solitary, I started to utilize little slivers of prison-issued soap.

And for me, it was very conceptually important because it started to talk about these ideas of kind of what the carceral system was originally designed to do, which was which was around repentance.

And so I would transfer, um, mugshot images out of the newspaper onto the surface of the soap.

And so that ended up being, I think, like 300 image transfers onto soap, which I then housed in used decks of playing cards, which I cut the faces of the kings, jacks, and queens off with the interior of a triple-A battery.

And then I ended up getting transferred to general population, which was basically an entirely new prison.

That's when I started basically taking images out of The New York Times and transferring them onto the surface of prison bedsheets using hair gel and a spoon.

Worked on it pretty much 12 to 13 hours a day over the next three years, um, never missing a day.

And it ended up being a piece that is 15 feet tall and 40 feet long and comprised of 39 individual bedsheets that I mailed out of my, um -- basically smuggled out of the prison piece by piece over a period of three years without ever seeing it compiled together until my release.

Making each piece and sending it out, uh, it really felt like I was sending pieces of myself outside of the prison walls.

The kind of psychological shift that happened in my mind with that, from thinking of myself as a criminal, something other than normal, and being able to replace that label of "criminal" with, "No, I'm not that.

I'm an artist.

That's who I am."

And I think the second part of this is art's ability to communicate.

You know, when I was in the prison system, every person in there has their armor on.

Like, everyone has been traumatized, everyone has been wounded.

It's not a space where you can show vulnerability.

But the one thing that kind of cut through that, like -- like a hot knife to butter, was making artwork.

It helped cut across all of these kind of racial divides, pretty much every single divide that you could possibly think of.

It was just this porous third-party medium that everyone could enter into, and it provided this safe space of conversation.

The organization that I founded is the Center for Art and Advocacy, and we focus on supporting formerly incarcerated artists at every stage of their career.

I think it's just really important that we focus on positive narratives, um, versus these, like, hypermediated, like, stereotypical ways that people who are incarcerated are often depicted, when the reality is they are your brother, it's your mother, it's your neighbor, it's your best friend.

It's literally one in three people, right?

Like, there's not a person on this planet who is more than three people away from someone who's incarcerated.

People are already human.

And so for me it's like, how do we provide the visibility of that versus hiding it behind walls?

And how do we then create the space for people to engage with that?

♪♪♪