MTV Documentary Films Sets Release Date For ‘Art & Krimes By Krimes,’ Doc About Artist Who Made “Secret Masterpiece” Behind Bars

deadline.com:

EXCLUSIVE: When you’re an artist incarcerated in a penitentiary, it’s not as if the warden will provide whatever you need to paint, like, “Grab all the pigment and palette knives you want.”Jesse Krimes, while serving time in federal prison, not only devised a way to secretly make art using available materials like hair gel and bedsheets, but managed to sneak his artworks outside the walls.

His remarkable story is told in the film Art & Krimes by Krimes, which MTV Documentary Films will release in theaters in New York and Los Angeles on September 30.

Alysa Nahmias directed the film, which is expected to get a major awards push.“Art & Krimes by Krimes is a portrait of an artist,” Nahmias wrote in a director’s statement, “but more than that, it is a distillation of my years-long dialogue with Jesse about his commitment to self-reflection, to discovering and believing in his own value as a human being in a mass-incarceration society that dehumanizes millions, and to the practice of making art.”Krimes was in his 20s and a recent college graduate when he was arrested on cocaine possession charges and sentenced to six years in the federal pen.“While in solitary confinement,” as The New Yorker has noted, “he discovered that he could transfer photographs from newspapers and magazines onto little soap squares using hair gel and a plastic spoon.

He then embedded the portraits in holes bored through decks of cards…”He made a 40-foot “secret masterpiece,” a mural composed on prison bedsheets.