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As the first-ever major retrospective of a Wabanaki artist in a fine art museum in the United States, Jeremy Frey: Woven is a groundbreaking exhibition in contemporary and Indigenous art. Featuring more than 50 baskets, made from natural materials like black ash and sweetgrass, Woven presents a comprehensive collection that spans a career of more than two decades. These works are intricate, mesmerizing, and expressive, emphasizing Frey’s prodigious skill and prolific creative output that honors and transforms one of the oldest art forms in the northeast.  

Frey, a seventh-generation Passamaquoddy basket maker and one of the most celebrated Indigenous weavers in the country, learned traditional Wabanaki weaving techniques from his mother and apprenticeships through the Maine Indian Basketmakers Alliance. An important aspect of Frey’s artistic vision is his drive to build upon the past and what was once passed down to him. “I have refined the teaching of my mother beyond anything I would have considered possible,” Frey states.  He pushes the boundaries of his work across concept, materials, and technique, adding “I try to create a newer and more elaborate version of my work each time I weave.” Basketry represents a core mode of cultural expression for Passamaquoddy people, whose tribal nation is one of five that form the Wabanaki Confederacy, along with the Penobscot, Mi’kmaq, Maliseet, and Abenaki. Their ancestral territory, called Wabanakik or “Dawnland,” stretches across present-day Canadian maritimes and the northeast United States, including where the Portland Museum of Art sits.   

Organized by the Portland Museum of Art and co-curated by Ramey Mize, PhD, Associate Curator of American Art at the Portland Museum of Art, and Jaime DeSimone, Chief Curator at the Farnsworth Art Museum, the exhibition is supported by a catalogue of the same name, Jeremy Frey: Woven, published by Rizzoli Electa in association with the Portland Museum of Art. It includes essays from Mize; DeSimone; Dakota Hoska (Oglala Lakȟóta), associate curator of Native arts at the Denver Art Museum; Andrew James Hamilton, associate curator of Arts of the Americas at the Art Institute of Chicago; and Theresa Secord, a Penobscot basket maker and founding director of the Maine Indian Basketmakers Alliance. Secord also served as a cultural consultant for the exhibition and co-editor of the catalogue.

Jeremy Frey: Woven

Tradition is ever-changing.

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