This article is part of our special section on museums on how institutions are striving to offer their visitors more to see, do and feel.
Long before artists like Winslow Homer and Andrew Wyeth arrived in Maine to capture its incredible natural beauty on canvas, Wabanaki natives used materials from the landscape to weave black ash and sweetgrass baskets, the oldest continuously practiced art form in the state.
“It’s said that our cultural hero, Glooscap, shot an arrow into the black ash tree and our people came out dancing — it’s related to us,” said Jeremy Frey, 45, a seventh-generation basket maker from the Passamaquoddy tribe, one of several in the Confederacy Wabanaki.
Frey’s vibrant and innovative baskets—remarkably modern forms woven from ancestral knowledge—captured the attention of the art world and placed him at the forefront of a wave of interest from museums, galleries and collectors in the work of local artists. (This month, Jeffrey Gibson is the first local artist to have a solo exhibition in the American Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.)
“There was this hierarchy that still sometimes exists within museum practice of what is art, what is craft, who is an artist,” said Jaime DeSimone, chief curator of the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Maine. She co-organized “Jeremy Frey: Woven,” the first solo exhibition of a Wabanaki artist in a fine arts museum in the United States. The show will be on view from May 24 to September 15 at the Portland Museum of Art in Maine.
The show, a retrospective spanning Frey’s career spanning more than two decades, includes more than 50 baskets and will travel to the Art Institute of Chicago — one of several major institutions that have recently acquired Frey’s work for their permanent collections — and the Museum of Bruce in Greenwich, Connecticut
Even 10 years ago, a fine arts museum in the Northeast wouldn’t accept a donation of a Wabanaki basket, according to Teresa Secord, a member of the Penobscot Nation and a basket maker who founded the Maine Indian Basket Makers Alliance in 1993 to help for the recruitment of young people to the tradition.
She mentored Frey after he joined the alliance in 2000, when baskets were sold at markets near resorts along the Maine coast for $100 or less. Frey’s baskets now sell at Karma Gallery in New York for $20,000 to $100,000 to museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and to contemporary collectors such as Carol Finley, a board member of the Dia Art Foundation.
“We were making baskets for our grandparents when Jeremy came,” Secord said. “He began to really refine the practice, making new shapes and styles and working with the materials in a different way than anyone had ever worked before – actually weaving the wood together.”
The Portland museum broke new ground in the art world at its 2015 biennial, where baskets by five Wabanaki artists, including Frey and Secord, were positioned front and center in the opening gallery, “making a statement that these are the original artists here in what we know as the state of Maine,” DeSimone said. “There wasn’t that distinction between us and them — they were just entertainers.”
Frey lives with his wife and three children just outside of Bangor, about an hour and a half from the Passamaquoddy Township Indian Reservation, where he grew up in poverty with his mother and two of his three brothers. (He never knew his father, who was Swiss.) Frey’s grandfather, a fisherman, was known for his utilitarian work baskets, usually woven by Wabanaki men; the more decorative “fine baskets,” as they are known, traded in the markets were made by women.
Frey’s discoveries challenged these gendered roles in basket making.
“All I ever wanted to do was be an artist,” said Frey, who made his own childhood toys with clay and carved wood. As a teenager, he was swept up in the reservation’s drug abuse epidemic. “I felt like my life was spiraling,” said Frey, who returned to weaving in early adulthood under his mother’s guidance, looking to keep his hands busy as he sobered up.
His basketry ability quickly gives him a new direction in life. From his uncle Frey learned how to pick the right ash trees in the forest – picking maybe one in 100 – and how to hammer and work the logs into long silky smooth strips that measured as thin as one-thirtieth of an inch to make finer woven baskets than others did.
“I’m always trying to see what wood can do, what I can do,” said Frey, who has challenged himself with unconventional color combinations and dynamic contours, mesmerizing patterns and three-dimensional textures, intertwining the outer and inner surfaces—essentially two baskets in one – or grow them to six feet tall.
“They’re a sculpture now,” he said. At the Portland retrospective, his latest weaving, a deconstructed basket, appears to spiral into the wall like a maelstrom.
Brendan Duggan, the founder of Karma, said the huge interest in Frey’s work has come “almost exclusively from contemporary art collectors”. Before the gallery opened its first solo exhibition of Frey’s work last year, Texas-based collector Marguerite Hoffman saw the baskets mounted on pedestals through the shop window. After knocking on the locked door, she made a purchase on the spot.
“I’m not usually a person who collects in the area of crafts or local culture,” said Hoffman, who chose one of the smaller two-tone shapes. “Something about form really touches me, like the curve of a beautiful car or a late de Kooning line drawn in space.”
The Baltimore Museum of Art’s new acquisition, Aura, a geometric relief of triangular red dots vibrating against a background of turquoise fabric, will be on display May 12 as part of a series of exhibitions called Concerned: Indigenizing the Museum. In July, the Metropolitan Museum of Art will mount an intergenerational exhibition of recent Frey and Secord acquisitions alongside a painting by Rabette Strickland in the Art of Native America entrance.
Frey’s baskets embody not just the final form, but “an entire process that includes community history, ties to homeland, and knowledge of local plant life and the natural environment,” said Patricia Marroquin Norby, who is Purépecha and the first curator of Native American art. at the Metropolitan.
The destruction of ash trees from the Great Lakes to Maine by the invasive emerald ash borer beetle since 2018 has posed a threat to Wabanaki basket production, something Frey is adapting to in a variety of ways. “The loss of Ashes I can’t describe it because it’s not just a material, it’s an identity,” he said.
The artist now collects twice the trees he needs and leaves the other half in storage for the future. He is keen to experiment with new mediums, including weaving with metals such as copper, and has completed his first series of ink woven monoprints to go to press.
Frey also made his first video, commissioned by the Portland museum and exhibited at the end of the retrospective. The camera follows him through the forest as he hauls logs and transforms them back to his studio into malleable strips and crafts them over months into a laborious basket. As he places the final plinth form in a pristine gallery, the object begins to smoke, then burst into flames and collapses into smoldering ruins.
Frey wants to leave his interpretation open.
“What does it mean to show up and be present and then disappear in an instant?” DeSimone said. “You can imagine the feelings and the realities about indigenous people here in the United States and life and loss. How can a basket symbolize an entire population?’
