Williams Forum
Main Building
Working across painting, textiles, sculpture, installation, and advocacy, Philadelphia-based artist Jesse Krimes draws upon his own experiences of incarceration and reentry into society to interrogate and critique the American criminal justice system. Produced in response to ongoing abuses at Rikers Island, New York City’s largest and most notorious jail, Rikers Quilt serves as a poignant metaphor for the underrecognized and continued mistreatment of people imprisoned in the United States.
Composed of individual bedsheet squares sourced from various prisons, the quilt’s brightly colored façade depicts vignettes of the different aspects of Rikers: its exterior, its deteriorating interior, and renderings for a proposed redesign. Krimes used hand sanitizer to transfer images from printed media onto the fabric, a technique similar to one he developed while incarcerated. Beneath the quilt’s surface lies a concealed layer containing 3,650 images of abuse inflicted by police and corrections officers at Rikers—one for each day of harm inflicted at Rikers over the course of ten years—that are revealed only when incisions are made to a square. Should the underlying images be fully exposed, the quilt’s exterior depiction of the jail would be irreversibly destroyed, offering a symbolic representation of the potential of prison abolition and transformation within the penal system.
