By David D’Arcy 

Beyond rich allusions to the past, Jeremy Frey and his generation of basket-makers are also creating objects that will leave your eyes spinning.

Jeremy Frey: Woven at the Portland Museum of Art, Maine, through September 15.

Jeremy Frey, Covered Vase, 2016, ash, cedar bark, cherry wood, sweetgrass, and spruce root, 14-3/4 x 7 x 7 inches. Portland Museum of Art, Maine. Photo: courtesy Luc Demers

Jeremy Frey makes baskets. More precisely, he weaves them, mostly out of strips of ash harvested in Maine. His current exhibition of 50 baskets, Woven, is a revelation of color and geometry, a journey into history and into a restless imagination.

Frey, 46, is a member of the Passamaquoddy tribe of the Wabanaki nation and lives in northeastern Maine, near the Canadian border. He was raised in the tradition of basket-making early on — it went back seven generations in his family. He turned to it as a young man because, as he might put it, nothing else worked and he was heading toward a drug problem. The decision succeeded. Weaving baskets was a fortunate turn for him — and for those who see his impressive work.

The beauty of his baskets is beguiling. It’s also often bewildering. When considering Frey’s accomplishment, think beyond conventional pictures of baskets, woven from the same wood and bark for centuries, although he’s done plenty of those. Introduce shapes and colors that seem intended to vault these baskets into the future. Keep in mind designs and influences from the late 19th century, when white tourists, called “rusticators” then, began vacationing in Maine, buying “homemade” Indian products. Some of Frey’s weavings offer a whimsical evocation of that time, glimpsed in tourist-pleasing baskets that are shaped like acorns, strawberries, and sea urchins. Beyond lots of playful allusions to the past, Frey and his generation of basket-makers are also constructing objects that are meant to leave your eyes spinning. We expect that kind of experience from artists, and these days Frey is being recognized, collected, and exhibited as one.

Jeremy Frey, Watchful Spirit (detail), 2022, ash, porcupine quills, sweetgrass, and dye, 27-3/8 x 22-1/4 x 22-1/4 inches. Denver Art Museum. Photo: courtesy Denver Art Museum

Although Frey has not described them as such, early works in the show have a classicized statuesque presence and a vaguely feminine profile. Some are in pale natural colors, bleached by exposure to light. The monochrome patterns of these works feel historical, and are easy to take in. The baskets that grab your eye are the colorful ones that magnify the old hues found in those delicate, traditional baskets — fancy baskets, as they were known — which Wabanaki weavers made when the “rusticator” market took off, particularly for women vacationers. Those objects had a utilitarian side, suitable for sewing kits and other uses. The baskets on view in Woven make no secret of their aesthetic ambitions, as if being useful wasn’t enough.

You can look at these creations as sculpture, as architecture, or as works of geometric abstraction. Some seem made to dazzle, their regal color combinations suggesting European influences that go back to the post-Napoleonic empires of 19th-century France. Yet ornamental as these baskets may be, they are also standing constructions. Their tautness and precision, structures made of delicately cut strips of ash, make you think of serene Japanese objects made with the simplest of materials.

Jeremy Frey, Observer, 2022, ash, sweetgrass, porcupine quill on birch bark, and dye, 13-1/2 x 10-1/2 x 10-1/2 inches. Collection of Carole Katz, California. © Jeremy Frey. Image courtesy Eric Stoner

The designs in those works, and in much of what is on view, are formidable exercises in geometry, Some of these repetitive shapes draw you in with their seemingly mathematical patterning (reflections on infinity?). Or are they just baffling illusions? Frey’s recent work can look like a set of puzzles: often one basket contains another, offering contrasting colors and motifs. His experiments with juxtapositions of shapes and styles can feel like surrealism, as if they were machines infernales of wood and bark. Does anyone remember the Op Art of the ’60s? That’s another one of the affinities present here.

“There are more brain surgeons than there are Passamaquoddy basketmakers, and if you master it, you’re a rare thing in the world,” Frey told Downeast magazine this summer. And he’s been gathering a following among younger basket-makers, so he may not be alone. A practice that seemed to be fading away is surging back. That’s good news.

But there is a threat out there, not directly to Frey, but to the ash trees that provide his materials. The emerald ash borer, a pest that kills ash trees, has reached the woods of Maine, attacking vast stretches of forest and threatening to wipe them out. Frey has already begun substituting other species, but ash has a special status in Wabanaki origin myths. He says he’s now stockpiling the wood. “It’s more than a material,” he said in an interview, “but I’ve had a long time to come to terms with its demise.”

Jeremy Frey, Shooting Star, 2008, ash, sweetgrass, and dye, 6 x 7-1/2 x 7-1/2 inches. Portland Museum of Art, Maine. Photo: Luc Demers

Museum exposure in Portland and beyond is helping build Frey a following. Woven travels next from Portland to the Art Institute of Chicago, the first “major” institutions to give Frey a one-man show. After that, the exhibition returns to New England, to the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Connecticut, a wealthy town where collectors might just help energize the market.

As new crowds in Portland and beyond experience the delicate and the infinite in Frey’s work, old predictable conversations will return. Are his baskets craft or art? Can manipulating woven strips of ash qualify as contemporary? Look for the answers in the baskets. Predictable they’re not.

David D’Arcy lives in New York. For years, he was a programmer for the Haifa International Film Festival in Israel. He writes about art for many publications, including the Art Newspaper. He produced and co-wrote the documentary Portrait of Wally (2012), about the fight over a Nazi-looted painting found at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan.