Boston Globe: Woven wonders at the Portland Museum of Art

Taking up an ancient practice, Jeremy Frey carries it into the here and now.

This article appears in The Boston Globe. Read it here.

By Murray Whyte Globe Staff,
Updated August 15, 2024, 2:50 p.m.

PORTLAND — When I met Jeremy Frey at his studio in Eddington, Maine, in the spring, the delicate nature of his ash-woven basket practice evoked for me a certain fragility, both of material and purpose. He was quick to correct. “You could drive a truck over one of these,” he said, deadpan, as he whittled a long strand of wood into a slim, threadable filament.

It was a statement with revelatory breadth. Wabanaki basket-weaving, a millennia-old practice among Frey’s people, the Passamaquoddy, is intricate and fine, yes, but it’s also an emblem of resilience and toughness for an ancient culture ground down by colonial menace only to survive, endure, and now thrive.

Right now, dozens of Frey’s baskets fill the marquee expanse of gallery at the Portland Museum of Art. Frey’s exhibition, “Woven,” is the museum’s summer blockbuster offering — an idea that, even a decade ago, would likely not have been considered in a so-called serious art institution. Basketry, Indigenous or not, would have been branded as craft, not art, and relegated to a faraway obligatory space somewhere less visible, where such practices were typically left to languish.

That’s just one of the things the art world more broadly — whether museums, curators, or dealers — has had to unlearn in those intervening years of eroding barriers and open minds: that a narrow definition of art is bad for everyone, and its widening to include long-marginalized groups is not a threat, but an opportunity rich with enlightening difference.

Are we there yet? Of course not. But “Woven” feels like a significant step in the right direction. Frey, who just received the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum’s 25th annual Rappaport Prize, is at the forefront of a cultural renaissance that’s reinvigorated traditional practices like basket-making and inserted them in the conversation of contemporary art. The exhibition is crisp and austere, like a display of Modernist sculpture; that’s intentional, Frey told me, to allow the pieces to stand on their own as aesthetic objects outside the frame of cultural history.

And they do: Even the expository pieces Frey made more than 20 years ago bristle with catalytic energy. “Basket with Cover,” 2003, squat, prickly, and pale blonde, has the presence of a living thing; another piece, “Fine-Weave Vase,” from 2015, is more intricate and experimental, with ash and cedar bark braided and dyed in an undulating pattern of black and white beneath a swooping rim.

The latter was an early glimmer of Frey testing the limits of an age-old practice as he carried the full weight of its history and import into here and now. This has been no easy feat. History, in this case, is fraught. Wabanaki basket-making, like many Indigneous practices, has traveled the uneasy journey from cultural object to colonial fetish commodity and back to cultural object, a path that’s been far from straight. A panel in the exhibition describes the market for “fancy baskets,” made for wealthy Victorian homes in the 19th century; and later, the mass-production of weaving as tourist product — an economic survival imperative after centuries of wealth and land being stripped from Indigenous tribes by colonial interlopers.

Frey, who grew up in Indian Township, Maine, a Passamaquoddy Reserve, before decamping for Portland, had none of this in mind when he started weaving in the early 2000s. For him, it was a healing practice he took on as therapeutic salve as he recovered from substance abuse back home. His mother, a tribal elder, taught him, and it became his refuge.

Quickly, he mastered traditional techniques and started to build his own unique vision within their age-old textures. Frey deflects suggestions that he’s some kind of guardian of ancient tradition, and the installation in Portland — elegant, neutral, spare — reflects that. Even so, his work undeniably forges a continuity between past and present: Filling a vitrine, Frey’s vibrant “urchin baskets” — semi-flattened spheres rimmed with spikes of all different colors — reassert a millennia-old form in the contemporary world.

Nearby, “Nearly Monochrome,” a 2022 tower of a basket braided with perfectly parallel channels of black and white, has the somber presence of the ages. Its size alone — one of Frey’s innovations was to work at a scale none had thought possible — makes a statement, at least to me: of a culture diminished near the point of vanishing, now resurgent and brimming with possibility.

Possibility, in fact, is a key conceptual underpinning to everything he does. When he started weaving, the task was to perfect the technique. That discipline, to paraphrase the great critic Gilbert Seldes in his 1957 “The Seven Lively Arts,” is what now sets him free. Some of the works here are exhilarating riffs on an age-old cultural practice, as uniquely personal as a signature. In the center of the gallery, dizzying pieces sit in tidy rows under glass. Every one of them is an experiment specific to Frey’s conception and hand. A small untitled piece from 2015 is dyed black and ash gray with little loops of wood braided into a grid that pulls away from the tight structure near the brim, like a shedding skin. “Emergence,” 2023, broad and stately, with overlapping rims that cascade into a web of black curls, seems almost to be growing in front of your eyes — its regular pattern dissolving into rhythmic chaos, like a flock of birds taking flight.

Frey shrugs off being cast as an avatar for Wabanaki culture — his work is his work, he says; it should be seen that way — but he can’t deny his growing prominence within it. He honors that culture in the best way he could: by affirming a tradition as dynamic and evolving, and making it his own.

JEREMY FREY: WOVEN

Through Sept. 15. Portland Museum of Art, 7 Congress Square, Portland, Maine. 207-775-6148, portlandmuseum.org

Murray Whyte can be reached at murray.whyte@globe.com. Follow him @TheMurrayWhyte.