First American Art Magazine: Exhibition Reviews "Jeremy Frey: Woven"

This appears in the Summer 2024 Edition of First American Art Magazine. Read if here.

By Julia Silverman

SEATED ATOP A PLINTH, a basket burns. At first just a trace of smoke creeps outward from between the spaces in the basket’s intricately woven ash walls. Then flames erupt. The basket’s once-meticulous patterning—rhythmic undulations of black, copper, and ash’s natural tan—begin to darken as the basket appears to twist and writhe, mangling under the flame.

This is the final scene of Ash, a ten-minute video by Jeremy Frey (Passamaquoddy), a seventh-generation ash basket weaver and knowledge keeper. Ash forms the centerpiece of Woven, on view at the Portland Museum of Art (through September 15, 2024, before moving to the Art Institute of Chicago). It is the artist’s first major museum retrospective and the first solo exhibition of a Wabanaki artist at the Portland Museum of Art (PMA). Woven brings together nearly 50 of Frey’s ethereal baskets that span more than two decades, along with new and experimental works in other media. The exhibition emerged from years of conversations between Frey and chief curator Jaime DeSimone, who organized the exhibition with Ramey Mize, the PMA’s associate curator of American art. Throughout, they reference Passamaquoddy terms for materials and weave structure and emphasize how basketry is embedded in Wabanaki language and culture.

Having already received many of the highest honors reserved for Native American artists including Best of Show at both the Heard Fair and Santa Fe Indian Market, Frey was adamant that the exhibition position his work as contemporary art. “I didn’t want to do a basket show,” he stated at the show’s opening. As he told Atlas Obscura, “I’ve spent my whole career trying to redefine what ash can be.” [1] Woven, therefore, represents basket weaving in an expanded sense. Rather than a retrospective display of finished works, it frames Frey’s longstanding weaving practice as a jumping-off point for explorations of new techniques and media.

Ash is one such “non-basket” work, to borrow a term from DeSimone. Tracing Frey’s journey from felling a tree to the destruction of the basket, the film immerses a viewer in the sounds and the kinetics of basket making, invisible in the final product. Indeed, Frey’s baskets seem immaculate. Passamaquoddy creation stories explain how people and animals first emerged from the basket tree, and Frey’s baskets, in their otherworldly precision, recall that act of divine creation. Ash, by contrast, thrusts a viewer into the thwack of Frey’s axe as he separates the bark; the swish of the splitter as he creates splints; the grinding of the lathe as he creates custom molds; and the rotations of his hands as he begins weaving the basket’s circular base.

By using the term “non-basket,” DeSimone doesn’t mean a departure from basket weaving; instead, she emphasizes how Frey has taken the techniques, methods, and lessons from baskets and extended them to new media. Caesura, a framed and wall-mounted work in ash and cedar, at first appears two-dimensional. Further observation reveals that the work actually extends backward, bringing a viewer into the oft-unseen interior space of the basket and into the wall of the museum itself. Basketry, in this case, becomes a vehicle for Frey to think about formal and technical issues of optics and space.

A series of relief prints, all from 2023, represent some of Frey’s most recent experiments in new media. To make the prints, Frey runs flat pieces of woven ash, sometimes inked, through the press. In some, the prints reveal the otherwise unseen internal structure of the splints from having unevenly absorbed the ink. A viewer is made acutely aware of the difficulties in translating the threedimensional structure of weaving onto paper; in others, the baskets leave only an embossing, a ghostly impression where the basket has deformed the paper.

There is a practical urgency to Frey’s “non-basket” explorations. The emerald ash borer, an invasive insect moving east across the continent, finally arrived in Maine in 2018 and now stands to decimate the tree so essential for Frey’s weaving. Finding new artistic outlets is therefore essential to Frey’s continued practice. At the same time, new media have enabled him to consider basket weaving in an expanded sense, as a set of conceptual and formal problems.

Of course, Frey is best known for his baskets, and those featured in the exhibition are astounding. The earliest baskets in the exhibition showcase the work of a young weaver, already experimenting with material and texture: Basket with Cover (2003), of undyed ash, juxtaposes the pointed “porcupine weave” with a quillwork lid, forging an echo between material and weave structure. First Fine Weave (2003), in the collection of Frey’s mother and teacher, Frances “Gal” Frey (Passamaquoddy), is his first attempt at the technique that would come to dominate his practice: breaking splints down into thread-like thicknesses. A stark contrast to the utilitarian fish-scale baskets that Frey’s grandfather Fred Moore Sr. (Passamaquoddy, 1933–2014) and other Wabanaki men had sold to Maine fishermen, fine weave and fancy baskets with bold colors, sinuous shapes, and textured over-weaves interested Frey most.

Frey first studied at home with his mother and then continued to study with the Maine Indian Basketmakers Alliance (MIBA), an all-Indigenous organization that promotes the vitality of Wabanaki basketry through marketing, workshops, and a formal apprenticeship program. Yet he was determined to advance his practice beyond “our grandparents’ baskets,” as Theresa Secord (Penobscot), basket maker and MIBA’s founding director, wrote in the catalogue. When Frey started weaving fancy baskets, historically a women’s style, only one other man was working in that style, recalls Secord. Few practiced fine weave—too intricate to be lucrative in a souvenir market, and Secord says Frey was the first to begin braiding ash and cedar wood, as others had done with coastal sweetgrass. He was—and is—one of the few Maine ash weavers to harvest his own materials, which mobilizes knowledge of the basket trees imparted by Moose (Fred Moore Jr., Passamaquoddy), his uncle.

Meanwhile, Frey also began experimenting with scale, weave structure, and color. Building his own custom puzzle molds (and later, hollow molds suited to larger baskets), Frey found himself drawn to both historical Wabanaki forms such as the squat and rounded “sea urchin” and taller vase-like forms. Influenced by his wife, Ganessa Frey (Penobscot), a weaver known for her miniature and fruit-shaped baskets, Jeremy Frey began incorporating synthetic dyes, creating rhythmic interplays of color that would highlight his innovative weave structures. Lulled into meditation through the repetitive act of weaving, Frey was consistently ruminating on how to push his practice further: “If I’ve spent a month [weaving] a basket,” he said at the exhibition’s opening, “I’ve also spent a month thinking about baskets.”

Throughout the exhibition, one can see how Frey uses baskets as a vehicle to think broadly about formal and technical issues like space and structure. Vase Basket (2008), a gourd-shaped vessel in which the basket’s lid forms a basket and lid of its own, marks the beginning of Frey’s experimentation with illusion. By 2012 he had started creating baskets with multiple rims, one seeming to grow out of another, with a distinct lack of clarity on what elements were structural and which were grafted onto the original form. He also began creating double-walled baskets where the inside of the basket had its own distinct weave structure, invisible from the outside. Works like Caged (2018), in which a spiked lattice overlay is woven into the basket’s weave, represent entirely new structures. Several works combine lustrous quillwork in animal portraits and landscapes that simultaneously depict and embody the forest ecosystem. He draws inspiration from other Indigenous art forms. “I like to engineer new things, and I like to complicate a weave,” he says. “Sometimes my technical challenges … you’ll never see them. I did it to see if it would work.”

Perhaps more pertinent is that the exhibition—and Frey himself—probe at what it means to “innovate” a customary art form. In press about Frey, it’s become a truism that Frey is an “innovator” or “elevator” of Wabanaki basketry. But often, such language can unfairly conflate recognition by a “contemporary art world” with the quality of the artwork, dismissing the many chains of innovation necessary to sustain any practice. As Frey notes, there was a first person to create a curl over-weave and to braid sweetgrass. “The changes that I’ve made, while they’re contemporary now, I’m still Passamaquoddy, and I’m still making baskets.” In Navigating Tradition (2023), Frey uses basketry to ruminate on this question directly. The basket’s exterior is humble by Frey’s standards, the undyed weaves vary in thickness, a reference to the utility baskets his ancestors wove to make a living. Tucked inside, however, is a hidden fine weave saturated with rich reds and purples of a Dawnland sunset. To innovate, as this basket seems to suggest, is not to ignore the “traditional” but to treat it as an interlocutor and source of inspiration.

So, with this context, what does one make of Ash’s burning basket? Is it a commentary on the art world? Does it jab at how museums fetishize objects while ignoring the cultural knowledge necessary to create them? Frey doesn’t give an answer. But just as ashes nourish the soil and enable new growth, one can imagine that the burned basket, for Frey, represents a site of emergence for ongoing methods and modes of artistic experimentation.

[1] Farhod Family and Andrew Lampard, producers, “In Maine, the Art of Basketry Hangs on By a Thread,” Atlas Obscura x Visit Maine, October 24, 2023, video, 5:22, web.