As a seventh-generation Passamaquoddy basket maker, artist Jeremy Frey has spent over twenty years foraging for ash trees, pounding its bark into fibers, and weaving those fibers into intricate baskets. It’s a centuries-old technique that Frey was taught by his mother, Frances “Gal” Frey (b. 1957), who herself was mentored by basket maker Sylvia Gabriel (1929–2003). At the Portland Museum of Art, Frey’s solo museum retrospective, “Woven,” on view through September 15, 2024 is the first major museum retrospective for a Wabanaki artist, and for Frey, it’s a celebration of his ability to innovate upon the form.
In Passamaquoddy culture—a tribe within the Northern Maine Wabanaki Nations—basketry depends upon the intergenerational transfer of techniques and ecological knowledge for the stewardship of the craft’s primary material: the ash tree. The tree’s strong-yet-flexible bark makes it the ideal medium for the basket. However, since 2002, an invasive species of beetle called the emerald ash borer has decimated the ash tree. Its regional preservation is in jeopardy. Within Frey’s exhibition, the beetle’s presence is foregrounded in numerous text panels that inform viewers of its impact. Against this backdrop, the retrospective places an emphasis on what it means to innovate within a threatened tradition.
Frey’s approach to this work has gained national and international attention: In 2023, he gained representation from New York-based Karma gallery and just this fall he became the first Indigenous artist to receive the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum’s prestigious Rappaport Prize.
Frey’s early small works—all under ten inches tall—act as an introduction to Passamaquoddy basketry. Nestled into three display cases, these baskets are tightly woven, lidded cylindrical vessels with natural ash and sweetgrass fibers in pale brown and yellow hues. Frey’s traditional process involves loosening the ash tree’s growth rings with the butt of an ax and splitting the resulting fibers into strips. Wide segments become the basket’s armature, while skinny filaments make up the weavers that dart over and under a basket’s ribs. Frey primarily creates “fancy baskets,” decorative objects traditionally made by women weavers for a market outside the Passamaquoddy community.
Beyond this first space, “Woven” opens to a larger room, featuring numerous cases holding four-to-five baskets each. Many of these objects feature stripes of dyed fibers. Between woven columns, occasional dyed fibers have been pulled out from the tight weave and bent to form a point. These spikes become a rhythmic, punctuated armor lining the body of many of Frey’s works. Some baskets are squat, resembling a sea urchin in shape. Others have tall, elongated forms, more akin to vases. Amid these sits a small basket titled Navigating Tradition (2023). Just six-and-one-quarter inches tall and nine-and-a-half inches in diameter, Navigating Tradition has a miniscule base and a widened upper section that quickly tapers into a slightly smaller mouth. Its exterior features bands of ash and sweetgrass in varying widths. The color of the basket is mottled, with a staccato rhythm created by the differing hues of the natural, undyed fibers. Its interior appears dark from afar; upon closer inspection, a riot of purple and red is revealed. These filaments have been dyed and woven into a checkerboard pattern (1). Navigating Tradition is a “double-walled” basket; Frey has woven one object inside of another in a technique that is entirely his own invention. In this work, innovation and individuality in the exuberant checkerboard nest within the confines of tradition, exemplified by natural, undyed sweetgrass and ash.
The basket speaks to Frey’s interest in creating something new within the boundaries of an ancestral craft. He emphasizes how his baskets build upon a lineage of invention passed down through an intergenerational transfer of knowledge—many individual basketmakers have added to a legacy of somatic movement and process.
Frey goes beyond basketry in “Woven” to incorporate intermedia works which grapple with the potential loss of the ash tree. Just beyond Navigating Tradition, a black wall beckons viewers to a small hall of untitled prints from 2023. It opens with a framed series of white blind debossings of basket segments on handmade paper. With their airy negative space and barely visible relief impressions, these relief prints drive home the gradual erasure of the ash tree. Nearby, a flat, rectangular portion of a basket has been inked in gold and printed on a black substrate. Across from it is an imprint of a radial basket bottom, inked in silver atop a sheet of delicate purple Gampi and chine colléd onto a gray paper backing. Both prints feature warps and wefts that jut beyond central intricacies. Metallic ink particles wink at close-looking viewers, glittering like stars whose piecemeal light reaches us today. Frey’s works on paper recall a lineage while anticipating the future of Wabanaki basket making. This collapsing of time creates a hybridized present for Frey’s audience. His prints honor the past innovations that gave rise the medium’s current form while hinting at an uncertain future.
Around the corner from the prints, Frey continues to push the boundaries of basketry through an exploration of its interdisciplinary possibilities. His first video work, Ash (2023), plays in this Gallery alcove. Commissioned by the PMA, Ash charts Frey’s traditional basket-making process. Visuals of the artist foraging, felling an ash tree, pounding loose growth rings, splitting, and weaving are accompanied by the sounds of Frey’s craft. Leaves crunch underfoot, a chainsaw revs, a mallet hits the tree, a blade scrapes against wood. Once Frey has led the audience through the basket’s stages of creation, he places the completed object on a pedestal. After a few moments, the basket begins to glow red. Fire consumes the work, charred fibers flaking off as the object leans impossibly forward, its structure compromised, caving in on itself. Ash again underscores Frey’s concern with the uncertain future of the practice of basketry, and what will be left of this traditional practice once its medium has been consumed.
Exiting the show, viewers walk through a hall of baskets adorned with imagery. One of these works is Cedar Loon Moon (2011). This basket is eight inches tall, and at first appears to feature ash punctuated by bands of rope. A loon floating in water against a white sky with clouds and the moon above is rendered in monochromatic browns and whites on its lid. Closer inspection reveals the rope-like material to be cedar, meticulously split and braided. There is no record of braiding cedar in Wabanaki basketry; it is a technique that Frey created (2). For the lid, Frey pierced a panel of cedar bark in a punctuated manner and wove porcupine quills through the holes. It is from this embroidery technique, called quillwork, that the loon emerges. While quillwork is present across many Wabanaki practices, Frey is the first to embroider upon cedar panels in the context of basketry.
Some works in this hall are over thirty-six inches tall, bringing a larger scale to a practice that traditionally foregrounds the smaller decorative object. These works occupy the exhibition space differently than their smaller counterparts. Frey’s monumental baskets are focal points, drawing the audience to their solid individual presence. Many of these works feature lone animals, such as a puma or a wolf, embroidered in quillwork on a bark-paneled lid.
The quillwork animals underscore the role of the ash tree amid other more-than-human lifeforms that once roamed the Dawnland (3). The ash tree once saw these creatures but they increasingly no longer gaze upon one another; similarly, the audience’s eyes have limited time to witness the present creation of basketry within this traditional medium as the ash tree population dwindles.
In this context, Frey’s baskets act as repositories of layered knowledge. The ash tree embodies its lived experience in its rings, creating a bio-archive as it grows. When its rings are transformed through weaving, they enter into a conversation with Passamaquoddy intergenerational knowledge. Finally, as Frey incorporates the visage of the animal that lived alongside the tree into these works, he reasserts the primacy of nature and memory within his practice.
To experience “Woven” is to enter an exciting toggle between media. Sight—who sees whom, and what is only seen in our memories—permeates Frey’s work across basketry, printmaking, and video. His expanded artistic practice conjures a ghostly future of absence, drawing attention to the haunting loss of medium and tradition that threaten his work. He innovates within this endangered craft lineage, finding and permeating hitherto invisible boundaries. The result for audiences of “Woven” is an exploration of an artist’s practice of manifesting chimeric time through works that exist somewhere between the past, an uncertain future, and the weight of the present moment.
1. Wabanaki basketmakers have incorporated dyes into their practice since the mid-nineteenth century; Frey has said he uses Rit dyes for this process. In Andrew James Hamilton, “Weaving Wood,” in Jeremy Frey: Woven, ed. Theresa Secord and Ramey Mize (New York, Portland, Maine: Rizzoli Electa ; in association with the Portland Museum of Art, 2024), 24.
2. Theresa Secord, “Evolution of an Artist and the Oldest Art Form in New England,” in Jeremy Frey: Woven, ed. Ramey Mize (New York, Portland, Maine: Rizzoli Electa ; in association with the Portland Museum of Art, 2024), 8–21. 15.
3. Wabanaki means “keepers of the Dawn.” The region of the Wabanaki Confederacy is known as the Dawnland.
“Woven” is on view at the Portland Museum of Art, 7 Congress Sq., Portland, ME, through September 15, 2024.
