Basketry at Portland Museum of Art
Date: posted on August 2025, for September 13, 2024
Artist Jeremy Frey has been making baskets in the tradition of his Passamaquoddy tribe for several decades. Frey is a seventh-generation basket maker. In the summer of 2024, the Portland Museum of Art in Maine showed “Jeremy Frey: Woven,” a collection of over 50 of his baskets in what one reviewer called “a hands-down spectacular exhibition” [Jorge Arango, Maine Sunday Telegram, 6/9/2024].
The work that goes into these baskets is remarkable. Jeremy starts with the tree, selecting one that has all the characteristics he is looking for. He works with customary materials such as brown ash and sweetgrass, but often introduces new materials into the mix. When working with ash, he splits, pounds, and cures the inner bark of the tree, forming long flexible swathes of fiber that can be woven. Then he weaves the material, sometimes working against a form that guides structure. Some of his baskets are over thirty-six inches tall.
Frey’s work is held in the public collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Abbe Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, Denver Art Museum, and the Portland Museum of Art, among others. He won Best of Show at the Santa Fe Indian Market in 2011. He shows his baskets from Portland, Maine to Paris, France.
An excellent article about the artist’s life and work can be found online at downeast.com. Written by Virginia M. Wright with photos by Jason Paige Smith, the article is entitled, “The Modern Master of Wabanaki Basketry.”
Jeremy Frey lives in Maine.
