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[soulful melody playing on cello]
[waves crash]
[light, rhythmic banging in distance]
[banging continues]
[ambient electronica music]
*
[phone ringing]
MICHAEL BROWN (on phone): Kintock Control.
This is Michael Brown speaking.
How can I help you?
Yeah, this is Krimes.
I'm leaving work to head to the house.
BROWN: What's your name again, sir?
Krimes. K-R-I-M-E-S.
-BROWN: All right. I got you, man. -All right, thanks.
-BROWN: All right? -Yep.
[line disconnects]
[flock of geese honking]
[bright clip-clopping of horse hooves]
[cars passing]
JESSE KRIMES: Me and my mother lived above
my grandfather's machine shop.
And when she was at work, I would always go downstairs.
Yeah, the smell of this place.
This is like a very distinct smell.
So, every time I smell it, it's like,
oh, yeah. I'm home.
It's a good grease smell.
The sandblaster.
I used to play with that thing
all the time when I was little.
So, you like put your arms in it.
It feels like you become this like machine,
and your hands are in here.
The phone that they could never find.
But people call here all the time, and they never answer.
I don't even know what that is.
I would always come through and raid everything
and steal the materials and turn 'em into my art projects.
I think these things are really elegant.
Which is weird to say about this dirty shit.
I would read Foucault's "Discipline and Punish."
There was an image in there of this tree,
and it was all contorted.
And there was a post that was stuck in the ground,
and they tied it around this contorted part of the tree
to try and straighten it.
You know, this one's straight.
That's how it's supposed to look.
These [chuckles] remind me of that contorted tree.
That's what happens when there's too much compression:
you bend the valves.
It freezes up the head,
completely shuts down the entire engine of the car,
destroys it...
all from this little thing.
But they're beautiful like that.
Yeah, I'll probably end up making something with these.
I think we found some new materials!
[light guitar playing]
Growing up, I didn't actually understand what an artist was.
I was always kind of like a maker.
There was these really interesting objects
that I connected with.
Machine equipment and cardboard boxes
piled up in the corner.
And I would always make these
three-dimensional theatrical structures out of cardboard,
just design little scenes and tape them together.
Got lost in making these things all day.
The only time I felt comfortable
was when I was actually making work.
*
[sandblaster whirs]
[sandblaster slowly powers down]
I always did really well in my art classes,
and I wanted to go to an art school.
[metal pieces clink and clank]
But I don't ever recall in my life anyone being like,
"Oh, this is something you're really good at.
You should explore this."
There was never really much direction.
I was kind of left to my own devices most of my life.
[mellow music playing on guitar]
I noticed early on, coming through school,
that I was different from a lot of my friends.
Most of the kids had two parents,
they had houses
and cars and, you know, nicer things.
My mother had me when she was 16.
It was basically a child raising a child.
We didn't even have a kitchen.
We didn't have a refrigerator.
Our beds were in the same room.
My mother had to work all day, every day,
and my biological father was never there.
The guy who raised me was Tom Adams.
He actually was there at the hospital,
but he wasn't in the delivery room.
But yeah, he came in right away and held him.
And, oh, he loved him. Yeah.
And... nobody ever loved Jesse like he did.
[mellow music continues]
JESSE: I was very close to him.
I didn't know that he wasn't my father
until I was about nine or ten years old.
At that point in time, his relationship with my mother
was going south 'cause he was drinking more and more,
and he was beginning to use heroin.
When I was 16 years old,
he was in, I think, a drug rehabilitation center,
and he just walked out the door one day
and went and hung himself in the woods.
And, um...
you know, that was kind of, uh...
that was intense.
So...
[sighs]
Yeah, that was, uh,
that was the point in time
when I started kind of acting out.
I got involved in drinking and partying.
I started selling weed
and then selling cocaine at parties.
*
It was no secret I was a train wreck.
Getting arrested all the time for public drunkenness
and underage drinking.
I was so reckless.
I really didn't give a shit about myself.
I didn't care if I lived. I didn't care.
I had full scholarships to Temple University,
Tyler School of Art.
But I ended up getting in trouble there.
I lost all my scholarships.
I got kicked out of school and went to prison
for possession with intent.
And that was my first time ever being in prison,
and I served a year and a half state sentence.
When I came home,
I was trying to work and go to school.
And the stress of that began to wear on me.
So, I went back to what I knew,
and I began, um,
selling cocaine again.
[tense music playing]
[indistinct TV chatter]
-It was a Friday night... -[heavy knock on door]
in February of 2009.
I immediately just turned and ran.
-[loud bang] -[police chatter]
They kicked in the door.
[police chatter continues]
[handcuffs tighten]
I admitted everything that was mine.
I showed them where the drugs were.
I was honest about everything and just sat there
while they went through the house.
And then they find 147 grams of cocaine.
ut when I refused to cooperateB and snitch on other people,
they increased my drug weights from 147 grams
up to 50 kilos based off of other people's statements.
And they're like, "Oh, yeah. I know that guy!
I got 40 grams from him yesterday,"
and then they charge you with that.
his is a typical practice thatT happens in the federal system.
[tense music continues]
CINDY KRIMES: And they actually called me
and said, "If he doesn't tell on these people,
we're gonna file federal charges."
And I said, "Go for it."
I said, "You can file all the federal charges you want.
I'd rather have my son in jail than dead."
JESSE: It was pre-sentence.
I'm presumably innocent,
and they had me in solitary confinement.
It was 23 and 1 lockdown, like dirt floors.
The sinks are busted off the wall.
The toilets leak and don't work.
There's no sunlight.
You get no outside recreation.
And you get thoughts of suicide.
I was basically losing my mind.
Art is what I know, so the whole time,
I was making artwork to survive.
[light chiming]
[pen scratches across page]
I worked on the purgatory series
the entire time I was in pre-sentencing.
I remember from when I was a kid playing with Silly Putty
that I could put it onto a newspaper
and pull the ink off of it,
and it would leave that inverse image on there.
[pensive music on piano and strings]
And I began cutting portraits of people who were accused
of committing crimes in the paper out
using the inner connector of a AAA battery
that I sharpened on the floor
and used as a kind of cutting device.
And I would carve prison-issued bars of soap
into little slivers.
And then by making the surface wet
and pressing the portrait on top of the soap,
it would leave the inverse image of the face.
In order for me to send these pieces of soaps out,
I needed to figure out a way to house them
so that they wouldn't break.
And that's when I thought of the prison playing cards.
*
[indistinct prison chatter]
I began collecting the cards
and cutting the faces off of face cards.
And after I would get so many cards,
I would make these card structures and mail out
two in an envelope.
And I made hundreds of them.
I would work roughly 12 hours a day.
This process kept me sane because, really,
I never knew if I would even make it out of there.
[music gently fades]
[traffic rushing, horns honking]
We went to sentencing,
and that was a major moment for me.
Just walking into that courtroom, you feel the power.
The United States of America versus Jesse Krimes.
Like, this is absolutely ridiculous.
All of these things that I viewed as not that serious
became very serious at that moment.
I'm never doing anything to put myself in this situation again.
I ended up being found guilty f 500 grams of powder cocaine.o
So, instead of 100 months, the judge gave me
a 70-month federal sentence.
The judge recommends that I get sent to a low-security facility,
but he also said that, you know, if I ever come back
in front of another judge again
that he has a permanent residence
for me in the BOP.
So, basically, I'm, you know, if I get in trouble again,
I have a life sentence.
[dramatic electronic music]
But the one thing that really stood out to me
was when he said,
"Earlier today, someone came before me who had
"a similar criminal history with the exact same offense,
"and I just gave that person 20 years.
But I see value in you."
n the moment, I was just like,I thank fucking God.
But then like afterwards, I was like, well, why?
I was with the guy in the holding cell
before I went in for my sentencing,
and it was a Black guy.
[balance creaks]
It seemed to me that race
was the main driving factor in that decision.
Honestly, it made me angry.
[somber electronic music]
The Bureau of Prisons ignored the judge's recommendation.
They didn't send me to a low-security facility.
They sent me to a medium-security facility
as far away from home as possible:
utner FCI-2 in North Carolina.B
It's full of every gang that you can imagine.
So, like, the Hell's Angels are there,
um, the Italian Mafia's there,
the Russian Mafia, Black Guerrilla Family, Pisces,
Sureños, Latin Kings, um, you name it.
Every major criminal organization in the world
is, is housed there.
Going in there, I was terrified.
But I walked into the cafeteria,
and it's like,
all the whites sitting here, all the Blacks
and all of the Spanish, and everyone was segregated.
There was like no racial mixing at all.
[voices echo]
Within the first couple weeks, there was this huge war
that almost jumped off between the whites and the Blacks.
[inmates arguing]
The guys handed me shanks.
I took them, but I just
threw them away in the trash can
'cause there's no way I was gonna go out there
and stab anybody.
I mean, that would've given me a life sentence.
That division is really fostered by the prison system,
so that people don't unify
and rise up against the guards and the staff.
[somber music playing]
You fear for your life on a day-to-day basis.
That was my introduction to the federal prison system.
[mellow guitar playing]
I found out that I was having a son
he week before I got indicted.t
Whether me and her worked out or not,
there's no way that I'm not gonna be there for my kid.
There was a lot of absence in my life,
and then I basically
did the same thing to my kid.
I know how damaging that was for me.
I knew that I needed to do what I had to do
to make it out of prison
so that I could come home and be a present father.
[indistinct shouting]
I felt like I was at war.
I had to get out intact.
I just stayed in the cell and made drawings as a way to
disconnect from everything that's going on around me.
[wistful piano music]
I wasn't that skilled at drawing before I went in.
It was just something I learned.
I began using graphite and a #2 pencil
to do recreations of masterworks.
But I would transfer the heads of offenders
over top of the religious icons.
I wanted to decontextualize the way that we view
who is an offender and who isn't.
And so, I also began transferring images of
celebrities and politicians, based on the premise
that we're all some type of offender.
It's just a matter of whether you've been caught or not.
[music intensifies]
Over time of making the work, people would come to the cell
and wanna talk and wanna see what I was doing.
So, they're like, "Oh, you're an artist.
Can you draw? Can you do portraits?"
So, I just did one real quick off of someone's ID,
and everyone was really impressed.
So, you know, then I had tons of people coming to the cell
to get portraits and buy portraits.
The work served as this medium of communication
that allowed me to connect with people
past that whole prison persona.
[traffic roars past]
They did a portrait of you and put it in Philly?
Holy shit! [laughs]
You got me, man. You got me.
They put a portrait of Cano in Philadelphia, overdue.
-[laughs] -And me right next to you.
I always wondered what this feeling was,
to walk into prison and not be an inmate.
-Yeah. -Here it goes.
I had the codes to this place.
I first met O and Cano
when I got transferred to Fairton, New Jersey,
which has a drug program.
This is Al Capone's cell.
[camera shutter clicks]
I basically used the drug program
to get me back closer to home.
[tender guitar music]
JARED "O" OWENS: Before I met Jesse, I wanna say it was,
had to be about 10 years
I was there for conspiracy to distribute powder cocaine.
In "Shawshank Redemption," I guess I was like
the Morgan Freeman of the art room [chuckling].
That's who I was!
I was the guy who knew how to get--
move in the environment because I was there so long.
One day, I walked in to go start on one of my paintings,
and he was sitting there. And I looked, and I said,
"Why is this guy sitting in front of my painting?"
And I said, "If he's sitting in front of my painting
and he's looking at it, then he's gotta be an artist."
What are the odds of me bumping into somebody
who's a conceptual artist in a federal prison?
I guarantee you if there's another conceptualist in there
[laughs] he might not ven know he's a conceptualist.e
CANO: What Picasso? What Picasso you don't like?
-A lot. -And he likes Matisse.
I love Matisse. I like him better than Picasso.
-Love Matisse. -Matisse is terrible.
-What?! -He's like one of the worst artists.
Ladies and gentlemen, excuse that sacrilege.
-Matisse and-- -I'm so tired of him.
-He's like a Renoir. -What?
-Renoir and Matisse. -Totally different.
-I like Matisse. -No.
-I wish. -[laughs]
This was every day in the art room. This.
-This what we do inside. -Every day.
JESSE: When I got there, I went straight to the art room
'cause I wanted to see who's making what,
if I could get a space.
o, I just spoke to the guards,S and they're like,
"Oh, you need to talk to O."
O: So, we started talking, nd the conversation went from,a
"Which prison did you come from? What did they have there?
"Did they let you have colored pencils? Did you have this?
Did you have that? What kinda paint did you have?"
And I knew a lot of artists he didn't know,
and he knew a lot that I didn't know.
So, we would feed off each other.
God puts people in your life.
[bright electronic music]
I had nobody else to talk to about art, you know?
There's not a lot of people in there that are
thinking about art on that level.
GILBERTO "CANO" RIVERA: And when you're in that atmosphere,
you don't wanna open yourself entirely to people.
But O lived in my unit, so it was like,
"Oh, we got a new artist. You're gonna like him."
So, when I met Jesse, we talked about art,
and I seen what he had to offer that was different
than other artists I had met.
And we just like hit it off from like the beginning.
JESSE: Artists are definitely treated differently in prison.
You're a highly valued member of the community
because you provide something real
that humanizes people and connects people
to their families and makes people feel valuable.
CANO: That's a commodity.
You sell it, you know what I'm sayin',
so you could eat, you would never go hungry.
Out here, artists go hungry.
O did really well in there, and Cano.
You know, they would paint a lot of portraits,
nd they would do a lot of worka that people would buy.
And that's how they survived.
That's how they bought their materials
to make the other work.
'Cause these guys were really advanced in terms of the work
that they were making.
They were doing beautiful abstractions
and experimenting
with different techniques and styles.
O: To me and Jesse and Cano,
doing portraits is like a card trick.
We were past that.
We were looking for something deeper.
[bright music on guitar and chiming bells]
-JESSE: When I was in Fairton,
I had a larger space to work in,
so that allowed me to change the scale of my project.
For the last three years of my sentence,
I created "Apokaluptein: 16389067."
he title comes from the originT of the word "apocalypse,"
which means to uncover and reveal,
in combination with
with my Federal Bureau of Prisons identification number.
began to think about buildingI a sort of time machine,
one made of images sewn together, blended, embedded.
A chance to travel outside of my container,
visiting the future that already exists
while avoiding the present circumstances of my condition.
O: He says, "I'm gonna take a sheet,
"and I'm gonna transfer an image with styling gel.
"And I'm gonna do a big one, all right?
And I'm gonna do Heaven, Earth, Hell."
And I was like, "Okay. I get you."
A little of, what's the guy's name? [clicks tongue]
JESSE: Bosch.
I wanted to do a kind of vertical triptych.
I'd decided to use federal prison bedsheets as a canvas.
So, I would do a bunch of work for other people,
portraits and tattoo work,
and then they would pay me in books of stamps,
which is roughly $7 in prison currency.
And then I would pay a friend of mine
who was working in the laundry.
He would give me two sheets.
The sheet itself is produced in the prison
using prison labor.
They pay them like 40 cents an hour,
and they're making millions of dollars.
So, the sheet that's produced by the incarcerated person
is then used to literally cover
and hide his body while he sleeps.
So, stripping their sheets and, you know,
defacing them, destroying them,
it was like a nice form of resistance.
When I saw that art had a "fuck you" element
to the system, I was all-- I was onboard.
I was like, great. I wanna be part of that.
[haunting electronic music]
I wasn't buying paints. I wasn't buying brushes.
I didn't need canvas.
I was stealing everything from the prison on purpose.
O: Procurement of all the elements of his piece,
whew, it takes a army, you know what I mean?
It is not, it's not like out here.
You need it, you go get it, you know?
In there, getting the sheets,
you can go to the Hole.
Getting the, the newspaper is a, is a mission.
I mean, the styling gel was ust as important as the paper.j
That's how he did the transfers.
He tried to buy a case of it, and they were like,
"What are you doing with all this styling gel?!"
nd they gave him two or three.A
They were like, "That's all you're gettin'."
You know, I would go to the commissary
and get him styling gel,
and they would look at me like,
"The fuck are you getting styling gel for? You're bald!"
[upbeat music on guitar and keyboards]
The staff would come sit and watch him and be like, "Cool."
One time, they said something.
"That's not a bed sheet that he's doing?"
I said, "No, no, that's a canvas."
JESSE: You know, this is considered contraband,
so it could've gotten me time in solitary.
If my points go up, I could've been sent to a penitentiary.
That was the least of my worries.
I just didn't wanna lose the work.
[upbeat music fades]
CANO: I didn't know exactly what Jesse was up to.
I never knew that he was onna make this colossal thing.g
He would complete a panel,
and it was kinda interesting the way he thought about it
way before how to unite these things.
And he was doing 'em, and he already had it sketched out
in his, in his mind what it was gonna be.
[chimes tinkling brightly]
-JESSE: At the time, I couldn't have explained to you
why I was doing it.
It was an intuitive way to work through these concepts
that I'm still figuring out:
what it means to be good and what it means to be bad.
And I was reading these philosophical texts...
"The Divine Comedy," "The Kingdom and the Glory,"
"The Wretched of the Earth,"
Bourdieu's "Distinction," Hegel.
Reading these philosophical texts
was a way to kind of decode these things to me
and work through some of these,
some of the visual imagery that was developing intuitively.
"The New York Times" served as my window onto the world.
That's why I was selecting imagery outta there.
Images out of the travel section,
man-made disasters, natural disasters.
This was the school shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary.
This is a father carrying his child after a bomb went off,
and she was injured by shrapnel.
ll of the Hell panels are madeA rom commercial advertisements.f
They would have articles exposing the factory fires
in Bangladesh where all of the workers were dying
in these apparel fires.
And it's H&M and it's Ralph Lauren.
And then there are full-page advertisements
for H&M, Ralph Lauren.
The figures came out of Foucault's
"Discipline and Punish," where he talks about
the corporal body.
And they're all ballerina figures.
They had this whole idea of this perfect human body,
the perfection of movement.
t's this completely artificialI thing that we idealize
and aspire to.
Each one of these would take about a month.
I would work on them in the cell,
oh, roughly,
probably 12 hours a day, seven days a week.
So, there's a lot of hours.
Making this was very transcendental and, you know,
I put a lot of blood, sweat, and tears into this thing.
So, using that material, to have it confiscated
was my biggest fear.
So, I ordered one canvas out of Blick catalog,
and when it came in the mail, I just took it off of the roll
and gave the canvas to Jared.
nd I put my sheets on the rollA and then put all the labels,
the Blick labels and the red tape, back on it
so it looked like it was a linen canvas
that was ordered through the appropriate channels.
And every piece that I finished,
it got boxed up and shipped out that day
so that I could minimize the chance of it being confiscated.
I had a rapport with the mail people. I'm like, "Hey, what's up, guys?"
And I'd be like, "How many boxes you got?" Five, six boxes.
I'd put his stuff on the top, and I would always make sure
that it went out.
JESSE: It kind of like took the place of my body in a way,
so when I was making it and sending it out, it was,
it was almost like sending out pieces of myself
outside of the prison walls.
[ethereal electronic music]
Realizing that I was about to be released,
I remember rushing
to finish the last section, which was the Heaven section.
And I ended up finishing the final panel
nd sending it out three monthsa before I was released.
That's when I had to start making plans as best I could.
Like, what am I gonna do when I come home?
Who am I living with? And do I have a job?
I had foolish delusions of grandeur
that I was just gonna come home
and create artwork, have serious shows.
[laughs] Like, immediately!
Not immediately, but that was the vision
that I had for my life.
[ethereal music continues]
There's still a million tripwires that would send me
right back into prison.
But I knew that I wouldn't put myself in a position
to be rearrested or to get that life sentence.
September 12th of 2013,
I was released into the halfway house.
Technically, by BOP standards, I'm still incarcerated.
The first time I was able to like come up here...
[turn signal clicking]
and actually drive on the highway?
All of that stress and bullshit
of being in prison and then coming home.
And you're happy to be home,
but you're still surrounded by people.
So, you're still like performing.
And being in the car was like the first time
I was actually by myself.
It was early in the morning.
There wasn't a lot of traffic.
It was the most liberating feeling.
I think I was singing at the top of my lungs,
and I never sing.
[optimistic piano playing]
[quiet conversations]
*
JESSE: All right. Love you!
Have a good weekend!
[traffic rushing]
[sirens in distance]
-Hey. Allie.
-How you doing? -How's it going?
These are the two walls. This is east and west.
Okay.
JESSE: My adjustment is probably
pretty atypical.
I had a transitional job waiting for me
as soon as I came home
with the Mural Art restorative justice program.
The director of the program, Robyn Buseman,
came into Fairton.
So, he was in the art studio, and he was showing me
a piece of this big work that he'd done on sheets.
But he couldn't show me the whole thing 'cause it was
kind of hush-hush, and it was on prison property.
And I said to him, "You know, when you get out,
"we can probably get you into our mural arts program
where we hire people to work our to six months, part-time."f
RUSSELL CRAIG: That's where I met Jesse.
Like a month after me working here,
then he came along to Mural Arts.
We was working together ever since.
We ended up getting a reputation for being like a team
that don't play when it come to installing and stuff.
So, I get dedicated.
We work on weekends, days, or holidays, all that.
JESSE: You see that, Craig? They don't even fit together.
They're not cut straight.
Craig often calls me Captain America
and calls himself Iron Man.
RUSSELL: Thinking you should, you go make the lines,
you should just put it there,
and that's gotta be a touch-up area.
JESSE: Put our lines there and get them to...
And then we argue, and I say, "No, I'm more like Iron Man
"because he's much more abrasive, matter-of-fact.
He's kind of a dick."
This is gonna be a, a nightmare.
Craig would be more like Thor, I think,
or The Incredible Hulk.
So, he's quiet, reserved, and then he turns into beast mode.
[spirited music on piano]
RUSSELL: I'm a visual artist. I paint.
It started like when I was very young.
I was around seven.
My childhood was like the hood, street life,
foster homes and stuff, ya know what I mean.
So then, once I started running away from them,
it was like the streets became like your family.
I was about 20 when I first went to jail.
I was like 26 or so when I went upstate.
Jesse had a lot of drugs, more than what I had,
and I did more time than he did.
I got a 5-to-10 in which I did 7.
We talked about that, but we don't go heavy into it.
He know, and we know. We just know.
It's just the reality of it, you know what I'm sayin'?
When I first walked in,
it was just all you see was like
mad Black people. And I was thinking like, damn!
They locking up a lot of Black people, and that's one jail.
So, just imagine all the jails in Pennsylvania.
Then you've got jails all over the United States.
[cell door slam shut]
One day, I went to the yard, and the wall's like
real, real big, you know what I'm sayin'?
When the sun set, the horizon, you can't see it.
So, the wall kinda killed my spirit,
and I like ain't go out for a year.
'Cause I had nothing.
Zero money on the books, zero visits.
And being like in the foster homes and stuff,
I never had no real family.
You just ain't have that support.
I would just watch the block, and I would just watch
how everybody was moving.
'Cause it's like a machine.
It's a dark machine, too.
That's why the art became important, 'cause it was
like a focus, and it was like an escape.
*
I did it all day.
All day, every day.
The goal was learn art, do art,
get outta the street life,
get outta the prison life.
[music swells]
JESSE: All right.
I think the best way to start is to just
put the whole top row in, and we'll go 13 down to 1.
-WOMAN: Okay. -Yeah, they're numbered funny.
The system I developed was like, in the process, so.
How many times have you put this all together?
Not very many, right?
No. I've laid it out on the floor a lot.
WOMAN: Yeah.
[laughter]
Well, I was actually on like a 40-foot scaffolding
-just the other day, installing a mural, so. -Oh!
This is kind of what I do every day!
-Is that with the Mural Project? -Yeah.
Wow.
[gentle piano music]
JESSE: You can see marks from the tiles
on the desk that I worked on.
It's almost like these little crosshairs.
That I always found really interesting
'cause it was like the trace of the actual prison.
I used the size of that desk as kind of my guideline.
*
[hammering echoes]
Coming home without this body of work
and without having something to kind of
represent my experience,
I mean, I wouldn't be able to really talk about it
in the way that I'm able to talk about it now.
-I think that's pretty good. -Yeah.
JESSE: I'm actually surprised
with how well it lined up and connected
versus what I thought it was going to do.
I thought it would be a little bit more disconnected
in the horizon line.
I'm really happy about it.
This is my first solo exhibition of my work ever,
so I'm really proud to have it,
especially in the state that had me in prison.
So, that feels really good to have it at a major university
in the same state.
We're the state university, you know?
-Yes. -So, that--
I like that. [laughs]
It kind of let me know that I was able
to accomplish something.
[music slowly fades into wind, birdsong]
So, what do you think we're gonna catch over here?
JESSE'S SON: I hope we don't catch a big catfish like last time.
JESSE: That was a massive catfish, wasn't it?
SON: Yeah.
JESSE: We'll have to call Grandma over to get it off
if you get one like that.
SON: Yeah.
-See, it's a fishing rod? -Oh, look.
You can see the whole way to the bottom.
Yeah! There's little fish.
That's where we're gonna go, right there.
JESSE: e has no idea I was in prison.H
-Is it on? -Almost.
Whoa! [laughs]
You got a worm in the face!
His mother brought him in to see me
when he was first born, when I was in Dauphin County,
and that was the only time I ever saw him
while I was incarcerated.
SON: Right there.
Ah, yeah, you can see 'em. Hold on.
I saw him again for the first time
when I was in the halfway house.
[giggles]
-What kinda fish is that? -Uh...
JESSE: I got a pass to go to the zoo to meet him.
Interesting place to meet your son for the first time.
Walking around a bunch of caged animals
after coming home from prison.
All right!
SON: There.
He was like, "Get offa me!"
[Jesse laughs]
JESSE: I remember not knowing how to treat him.
-You wanna throw him back? -Yeah.
JESSE: He very immediately felt like my son,
but also felt like someone else's kid.
SON: Yes! This is where big fish are.
JESSE: His reaction was, like, at first a little shy
and kind of clung to Mom,
like when we first met outside of the zoo.
-SON: Finger. Bleeding! -JESSE: It'll be Okay.
JESSE: It's important that he knows that I'm there now,
ust showing up and being therej as much as I can.
[indistinct French chatter]
[traffic roars, bright music begins]
[subway squeals]
*
JESSE: I wasn't allowed to go outside at all.
-PATRON: Lights? -Nothing.
-No sunlight, no fresh air. -No sunlight.
For a year.
This work was very meditative,
so it allowed me to disconnect
from all that kind of, that dangerous environment.
It had that element of game and chance,
and the soap has this latent kind of language
of purity and sanitization
and washing oneself of one's sins.
[stirring piano and string music]
It's pretty amazing to think that I was just in prison
a little over a year ago.
It's nice to have this work that was hidden and created
in solitary confinement having a chance to speak.
But it feels very...
very empowering to be here.
*
I had to write a letter to my probation officer
to go to Paris.
And he told me he supports me going,
but he had to get approval from his boss.
And then they had to go in front of a United States judge
to get approval for me to leave the country.
You know, I'm going home tomorrow, and as of right now,
I don't have a job waiting for me.
o it's a little bittersweet inS the sense that, you know,
this is a great opportunity,
but now I have to kind of go back to reality
after being here and try to find work.
[echoing footsteps]
You can tell how old these paints are because
they don't actually come out of the tube. [chuckles]
But I think the one thing you learn in prison is to
not waste your materials.
So, I've had most of these paints since...
before prison.
I haven't really bought any new materials.
I try to buy as, um...
the least amount of new materials as possible,
so I just use the old, crappy paint that I have
and try to make it stretch.
The deck's stacked against you when you come home,
and there are days when I feel depressed.
Being out here and not having money,
it's kind of like still being in prison.
Your liberty and your freedom is dependent upon money
in a lot of ways.
I moved in with a friend of mine.
I'm not paying rent right now until I figure out
what I'm gonna do.
Since working with Mural Arts was temporary,
I need to find a job.
I've applied for a lot of positions,
and I've gotten a lot of interest.
However, my record stops me from getting a lot of jobs
that I think I'm well-suited for.
So, I'm free, but I'm not really free in the sense
that other people are.
They still have their hooks in you.
So, even right now, I'm on supervision.
o there's this kind of tensionS that you always feel,
where the tiniest little thing can send you back to prison.
It's just this looming thing over you.
I started drinking.
I started smoking cigarettes again.
It's easy to fall back into old behaviors.
*
CASHIER: $39.29.
-And did you want any cash back? -No, thank you.
I can feel myself getting agitated and more reckless.
And I can feel that kind of tension creeping back in
that existed before I went to prison.
*
[music slowly fades]
I was trying my best to get Lead Artist positions,
apply for fellowships, get grants,
and nothing was really panning out.
And so, it was just a real constant struggle.
I felt really worn down.
[dark guitar music]
One night, I ended up going out
in Lancaster with a friend.
I got pretty drunk, and when I walked outside,
there was a cop standing out there.
And he said that I stumbled, and he arrested me
for public drunkenness.
It felt like the thousands of nightmares that I've had
since I've come home from prison,
here I wake up in a jail cell.w
It felt like everything was lost.
First on my mind was just how royally I fucked up with my son.
How, if they violate me, and I don't get to see him
this weekend, that I've already established
a relationship with him.
And then now, this feels like an insane betrayal.
Particularly after going through what I went through.
[soft music playing]
These aren't things that are just magically fixed.
These are things that are a part of you forever.
Waking up in the jail, I didn't have the expectation
that I was going to get off.
Everything that I had been working towards for years
was about to just vanish.
I was violated and going back to prison.
Before I could even call my probation officer,
he called me.
Instead of violating me, he ended up recommending
that I go to counseling.
[soft music fades]
The only other person that I told was Craig.
RUSSELL: We was going out after that.
He's like, "I can't.
I gotta chill 'cause I got locked up."
And I was like, "All right, word."
And I just be supportive of it like, "You got through
"that shit, you understand.
"So, let's not fuck up again 'cause if you do,
it'll prove whoever tryna take you down right."
[indistinct chatter]
And so, it was like, "We need to go back to work."
And it was just art, art, art. It's always art, art, art.
JESSE: You know, we just had a conversation where it was like,
"We got too much good shit going on to throw it away
for this kinda stuff. Get back in shape."
[bright, energetic electronic music]
[whispers]: That should work.
*
Got it.
[music continues]
Whoo! Look who made the book.
There it is!
*
-MAN: Did you meet these guys? -JESSE: Jesse, nice to meet you.
These are the guys from "Philly Voice."
So, yeah, we were thinking that we would do
the portrait shot first.
[camera clicks]
PHOTOGRAPHER: You wanna maybe smile a little bit?
Awesome.
So this exhibit, did the gallery come to you for this?
JESSE: No, it kind of it was a mutual thing.
So the curator, Julie Courtney,
we had been planning to do a show,
but we didn't have a place to do one yet.
And she went out to lunch with someone from here,
and they were very open to having her come in
and curate the show here.
Do you think your life would've shaped up this way had you not gone to prison?
Like, do you look back on that and think maybe that was like
a meant-to-be kinda situation?
I do, actually. Prison really focused me.
I think it really made me angry and kind of resentful
while I was in there.
But rather than get depressed and then get down on myself,
I used that as like fuel and this unending source of
drive and energy to make more work.
Because I saw the power and kind of self-worth
that it was giving to me.
Like, the level of drive that that instilled in me is just,
it's non-stop, so.
Eventually, I feel like would like to relax a little.I
But, yeah, I feel a tremendous social weight
has been placed on me.
-Hey, how are you? -Good!
JESSE: You know, I still have tons of friends who are in there.
Yeah, for the first year, pre-sentence...
So, maybe one day I'll slow down and relax a little,
but right now, it's just non-stop.
[upbeat piano music]
My documentary will explore the trauma-to-prison pipeline,
the effects of trauma on the brain,
restorative justice, and re-entry.
Storytelling can create empathy,
and empathy can move people to act.
My project will allow an audience to know
and, hopefully, empathize with those of us
who have made tragic mistakes.
One of the things that really burned itself into my brain
when I was incarcerated was having a woman's body
going through the system and losing authorship,
losing authority over that body.
And so, I just was really interested in this idea of
the dehumanization of the body as a result of incarceration.
The first project is the "Inmate Activity Book."
It started out as like a joke.
It was a friend of mine who was doing Fed time,
and so I was sending him funny drawings,
basically, is how this started.
We printed a couple editions, and the feds like confiscated
whole runs of this book.
Okay, so, they say-- she likes it.
[laughter]
While I was in grad school in 2012,
I was wrongfully incarcerated.
I came up with this little idea of bringing my experience
to the space that I was in.
RUSSELL: We provide formerly incarcerated artists
from different disciplines $20,000 apiece:
10 for your pocket, 10 for your project
to create, like, art.
And providing an opportunity to put their talent out there
to show the world this talent.
JESSE: It's work that needs to be in MoMA.
It's work that needs to be in the Whitney.
And it's work that no one knows about.
WOMAN: Sherrill has the best kicks out of all of you.
Okay.
[indistinct chatter]
*
[birds chirping]
JESSE: So, I started getting a couple bigger projects.
I was the lead artist on the Voices Project,
which was a big project here in Philadelphia
hrough the Mural Arts program.t
That was definitely the biggest check that I've gotten
to lead a project.
And then I found out that I got selected
for the Rauschenberg Fellowship.
Hi.
And then the Art for Justice grant
was really the thing that solidly
put me back up on my feet.
So, I was feeling much more financially secure, I mean,
for the first time since I've been home.
[music slowly fades]
[cat meows]
This is a first edition Foucault,
"Discipline and Punish."
But the thing that's really interesting about it,
it's actually called, well, I'll murder it,
but it's basically "Surveillance and Punish," right?
And so, I was wondering, like, what happened in the translation
where they switched to "discipline"?
Because it's a very different connotation.
[ethereal electronic music]
[geese calling]
SON: I betcha my shoes are gonna smell like cow poop.
-[Jesse laughs] -I hate cow poop!
JESSE: You probably already smell like poop.
SON: I do not smell like poop!
JESSE: When's the last time you showered?
SON: Not yesterday, but the day before yesterday.
JESSE: Okay. That's pretty good.
SON: I bet you the police are gonna catch us!
JESSE: You think?
I feel great about being a father.
Yeah, but, you know, I still wish I could do more.
We should transfer this one.
I wanna show you how to do a transfer.
With [strains] hand sanitizer.
Like, I'm still in Philadelphia.
He still lives in Lancaster.
I only see him every other weekend,
and so there's parts of that that's like...
I don't know. I don't know how you fix that.
I definitely don't wanna move back to Lancaster.
So, that's not the best idea,
and I don't think that would be good for anyone.
So, I'd be there more, but I'd be miserable.
I like that technique. [laughs]
[whispers]: Beautiful!
Oh, look. That little smoke piece didn't transfer.
-Yeah, some of it did. -Oh, yeah. Some of it did.
And the spots look cool because then
it's like a woodpecker pecked it.
-Yeah. -Like a bird.
*
I wonder if I can come back at night and, like,
rip that out by the roots!
You gotta see what's under there.
It's interesting that some of the branches are like this,
and then some of them are roots.
The fact that you can't tell the difference
between opposite ends of the spectrum, right?
Whether it's a branch or it's a root system, like, either way,
it's still like an interconnected system.
And so, like, there is no top or bottom.
That's basically what the whole idea of the show is about.
[drill whirs]
I wasn't prepared for how difficult it was going to be
to be taken seriously as an artist
versus just viewed as a prison artist.
I mean, this guy needs some love anyway.
I think in 2016, I had went up to New York to show
"Apokaluptein" at the United Nations.
There you go. Blow it real light.
Go ahead.
And one day, me and Julie Courtney walked to Chelsea
because we wanted to see the shows,
and Julie just walked into a gallery.
And she came back out, and she's like,
"Oh, you really need to come in here.
"You need to meet Barry. He owns the gallery.
He's interested to meet you."
And then after talking, showing him my work,
he took me on as the first artist
that he's represented as a gallery.
I feel like I've been able to se my privilege, my education,u
and my networks to build something that is sustainable.
But the thing that's kind of frustrating to me is that people
who have been in prison
who are super, exceptionally talented artists
are not getting projects, not getting platforms,
in the top-tier contemporary art sphere.
And, I mean, t's slowly starting to happen,i
but they're missing the value that someone
who has been through this experience can contribute.
One in three people has a criminal record.
And so, that is a clear signal to me
that there is a whole pool of wasted talent,
not just in the prison system,
but people who have since come home.
[serene piano music]
RUSSELL: There's so much against you.
And I'm seeing more and more now how...
difficult things are.
It's always like a challenge every day.
In prison, you're sought after, you know what I mean?
Here, it's a dime a dozen, know what I mean?
And that, that's the sad truth.
But we trying to prosper, and we not going back.
At least we're gonna do verything in our power not to.e
O: I'm just gonna keep making art.
And as frustrating as it is not to sell a lot of paintings ,
you gotta block that out.
So, the next step for me is just to keep painting.
*
Actually, today...
Yeah, so, today makes five years
since I was released from prison.
So, I've now officially been home...
longer than I've been in?
And my exhibition's opening tomorrow,
the day after I came home?
It's all good shit.
[soulful guitar music]
Ow, ow. That's hard to open.
[lid pops off]
Early celebration, calming mechanism, a lot of things.
*
There were a couple people who said they couldn't make it.
MAN: Like who?
O. So, O said the hurricane messed up
all of his travel stuff.
It was all kind of last-minute anyway.
He lives in South Carolina.
It's a pretty big ask to have
someone come up to New York
for a night to see a show.
What's up? How you doing?
A ton more fruits.
-Thank you for coming. -Yeah, no problem.
Aw, shit! Cano!
What's up, baby? How you feeling?
-What's going on? I'm good. -Yeah?
-Yeah, yeah, yeah. -Look who I bring with you.
-Hey! -See? Somehow.
I got you. I got you. I got you.
Somehow, I knew he was gonna be here.
I got the text, and I was like, that shit's fake!
-That's fake. -[laughs]
-What's up, my brother? -You can't bullshit me.
-I know. I tried. -[laughs]
I thought I would get you.
[indistinct chatter]
[light guitar playing]
*
JESSE: I was like, where the fuck?
RUSSELL: You even saw me when I first came in.
-Yeah, I did. I did. -Come get a drink with us.
-Late, though, late! -[laughs]
-It was a nice turnout and everything. -It was great, man.
It's better than I--
and I was like, I ain't know this poppin'
-more than that other joint. -Yeah, for sure.
So, the glass is actually blown into those structures, right?
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
-WOMAN: And then these are epoxy? -That's actually plastic.
-WOMAN: Yeah? -So, those are digital.
WOMAN: It's a transfer, like you were doing before.
JESSE: Kind of, yeah.
-This is amazing! -Thank you.
-Are you happy with it? -I am.
I'm incredibly happy.
-It's ah-mazing! -Yeah.
So, these are all natural roots.
And then I got the very cliché artificial plants
and attached them on and melted the plastic
and formed it and painted it
so they all look as seamless as possible.
-CANO: Presentation. -Yeah? Yeah, yeah.
Feeling this big time. I'm feeling this big time.
-Got the flowers going on. -[laughs]
I thought you'd like the flowers.
-I was like, this is Cano. -Yeah!
I remember when we were talking shit the one day.
You're like, "Sometimes a motherfucker
-just wants to paint flowers." -[laughs] Oh.
I was like, yeah. I get it.
I need this picture, too.
*
[birds chirping]
[tranquil guitar music]
JESSE: I'm not ashamed about
being in prison at all.
don't think anyone should be.I
You know? I made a mistake.
I'm not a bad person.
It doesn't make you a bad person.
Everyone likes to just be these simple narratives
and classifications because it's safe.
But people are complicated and more nuanced than that.
*
Some of them are probably living,
so you shouldn't break them off.
Well, this one's dead. Can I break this?
-Nah. -Come on!
-No, no breaking trees. -It's dead!
[soft piano playing]
JESSE: I feel pretty good.
But at the same time, it's bittersweet.
Because, you know, I'm here, but yet,
I think about a lot of the people who are still in prison,
who aren't going home...
at least not any time soon.
*
[energetic, uplifting piano music]
*