Featured in the Film
JESSE KRIMES
Visual Artist
Jesse Krimes is an artist, curator, and founder of The Center for Art & Advocacy and 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.
JARED OWENS
Visual Artist
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.
RUSSELL CRAIG
Visual Artist
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.
GILBERTO RIVERA
Visual Artist
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.”
Artists Bureau
The Art & Krimes by Krimes Artists Bureau is a group of acclaimed, system-impacted artists who participated in screenings and events related to the film in 2022-2023. More information about each artist is below.
"Jesse Krimes' art is indeed staggering, but his relationship and commitment to lifting up the voices of people formerly and currently incarcerated, predominantly Black and Latinx people, even more so. My intense desire is that people will watch Art & Krimes by Krimes and hear its thesis loud and clear: We are all, those in cages and those outside of them, imperfectly human; to forget this is to forget ourselves."
— Faylita Hicks, Artist Bureau Member
FRANK BLAZQUEZ
Visual Artist
Frank Blazquez is a visual artist working in portraiture, documentary film, and mixed-media. With multiple essays published in The Guardian, he is also a writer. Blazquez focuses on counter-narratives across the American Southwest and tropes related to Latinx culture along the US-Mexico border. The creator demonstrates his experiences connected to urgency and rehabilitation. The Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery is currently exhibiting Blazquez’s portraiture and his artwork was recently displayed in State of the Art 2020: an exhibit at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.
MARY ENOCH ELIZABETH BAXTER
Visual Artist and Musician
Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter is an award-winning Philadelphia based multidisciplinary artist, educator, and activist who creates socially conscious music, film, and visual art through an autobiographical lens to develop, articulate, and convey intersectional counter narratives that interrogate the ways in which the historical over-policing and or exploitation of Black bodies facilitate, perpetuate, and often legitimize the continued subjugation of Black people in America. Her work has been exhibited at venues including MoMA PS1, African American Museum of Philadelphia, Eastern State Penitentiary, Ben & Jerry’s Factory in Waterbury Vermont, Martos Gallery, Frieze Los Angeles and The National Underground Railroad Freedom Center.
FAYLITA HICKS
Writer and Multidisciplinary Artist
Faylita Hicks (she/they) is a queer Afro-Latinx activist, writer, and interdisciplinary artist. Born in South Central California and raised in Central Texas, they use their intersectional experiences to advocate for the rights of BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ people. They are the author of HoodWitch (Acre Books, 2019), a finalist for the 2020 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Poetry, the former Editor-in-Chief of Black Femme Collective and Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, and their poetry, essays, and digital art have been published in or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Ecotone, Kenyon Review, Longreads, Poetry, Slate, Texas Observer, and Yale Review, amongst others.
MITCHELL S. JACKSON
Writer
Mitchell S. Jackson is the winner of the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing and the 2021 National Magazine Award in Feature Writing. Jackson’s debut novel The Residue Years received wide critical praise and won a Whiting Award and The Ernest J. Gaines Prize for Literary Excellence. His other honors include fellowships, grants, and awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, Creative Capital, the Cullman Center of the New York Public Library, the Lannan Foundation, the Ford Foundation, PEN America, TED, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Center for Fiction.
ASIA JOHNSON
Activist and Filmmaker
Asia Johnson is a writer, storyteller, and filmmaker who has worked with several organizations in the criminal justice reform space, including The Bail Project, cut50, Shakespeare in Prison, Prison Creative Arts Program, Hamtramck Free School, and the Michigan Prison Doula Initiative. Asia is a 2019 Right of Return Fellow, 2019 Room Project Fellow, 2021 Brennan Center for Justice Fellow, 2022 Art for Justice grantee, and a 2022 Highland Leader. Her Chapbook, An Exorcism, was released in 2018 and her directorial debut, Out of Place, was released in 2022.
KAMISHA THOMAS
Filmmaker & Visual Artist
Kamisha Thomas is a multidisciplinary artist from Columbus, Ohio, and a second generation carceral system survivor. She co-founded the Returning Artists Guild (RAG) with Aimee Wissman after serving seven and a half years in prison to continue the community and camaraderie she felt while participating in and facilitating arts programming while incarcerated. Kamisha is a Right of Return Fellow who is passionate about prison abolition, artist advocacy, and amplifying the voices of marginalized people. She is drawn to works that promote critical thinking and paradigm shifts.
VICTOR “MARKA27” QUIÑONEZ
Visual Artist
Victor "Marka27" Quiñonez is an international street artist who works at the intersection of contemporary art, graffiti, vinyl toys, fashion and design. With paintings, murals, drawings, mix-media pieces and private commissions for major brands, his robust palette blends elements of street and pop culture with Mexican and indigenous aesthetics—a signature look the artist has coined “Neo Indigenous.” Marka27 has flourished as a product designer, gallery artist, toy designer and more. Marka27 has emerged as one of the most sought after muralists in the world, mastering his craft since before “street art” was even a term.
The Center for Art & Advocacy
The Center for Art & Advocacy (The Center) was established in 2022 to serve as a direct path to sustainability and equity for artists directly impacted by the criminal legal system. Built on the success of the Right of Return Fellowship (ROR), the Center was created to provide a multi-purposed network that actively engages in the conversation about transformative justice practices–and the critical role they play in the arts community-at-large. The Center is committed to prioritizing our formerly incarcerated artists as they develop their skills, innovate within their fields, and take on new leadership roles.
Right of Return Fellowship
Right of Return Co-Chairs Jesse Krimes and Russell Craig and The Soze Agency are proud to announce the third year of the Right of Return USA Fellowship, generously funded by the Open Philanthropy Project. The fellowship program will continue to invest in formerly incarcerated artists, supporting the creation of original works produced in partnership with advocates and organizers to further criminal justice reform efforts. In this third year, we will be awarding a diverse group of six artists a grant of $20,000 each to support a project aimed at reforming our criminal justice system.
Marking Time
Marking Time features works that bear witness to artists’ experimentation with and reimagining of the fundamentals of living—time, space, and physical matter—pushing the possibilities of these basic features of daily experience to create new aesthetic visions achieved through material and formal invention. The resulting work is often laborious, time-consuming, and immersive, as incarcerated artists manage penal time through their work and experiment with the material constraints that shape art making in prison. The exhibition also includes work made by nonincarcerated artists—both artists who were formerly incarcerated and those personally impacted by the US prison system.
Musicambia
Musicambia uses the power of music to build supportive communities where incarcerated individuals can build human connections, engage in learning and rebuild their lives. Through performance and creation, participants develop self-confidence, positive self-image, and communication skills. By sharing their skills, musicians grow as teachers and citizens committed to humanizing our justice system.
