Passamaquoddy Basket Weaver Jeremy Frey, From Addiction To Adulation

Forbes

25-07-2025

Jeremy Frey (Passamaquoddy, born 1978), 'Blue Point Urchin,' 2016, ash, sweetgrass, and dye, 5 x 9 x 9 inches. Collection of Dr. and Mrs. Ari and Lea Plosker. © Jeremy Frey. Image courtesy Eric Stoner
A popular retelling of the Wabanaki creation story states that man came from the bark of ash trees. The basket trees. The magic, giant-hero Gloosekap shot the trees with his bow and arrow and from the split wood human beings came forth.
The Wabanaki come from ash trees in what is now called Maine.
The same ash trees being obliterated by invasive emerald ash borers across the country. Tens of millions of ash trees lost to the shiny, metallic green, half-inch insect in Michigan's lower peninsula alone. It is believed the bug came to America via the Great Lakes having burrowed into wooden shipping pallets originating in its native Asia.
First identified in the U.S. in Michigan in 2002, Maine had its first sighting in May of 2018. The insects don't travel far themselves, but as was the case with transport from Asia to Michigan, human activity spreads them beyond what the bug can accomplish. Moving firewood from one place to another is the likely reason for how the insect has been able to hopscotch into 33 states and Canada, killing hundreds of millions of trees in what amounts to the blink of an eye in forest terms.
DON'T MOVE FIREWOOD BEYOND WHERE IT'S SOURCED!
Jeremy Frey (Passamaquoddy, b. 1978) occupies the space between the ash tree's life-giving past and its ominous future. The most celebrated weaver of Passamaquoddy baskets ever, each of Frey's creations carries a memory of Gloosekap, a warning of the emerald ash borer, and the artist's unique signature.
He has imagined and achieved designs and forms in Passamaquoddy basket weaving previously unthought of. Breathtaking innovations of conceit and skill. New materials and bold experimentation with color, pattern, shape, and scale. Intricately woven double-walled baskets. Baskets inside of baskets recalling nesting dolls.
Thanks to Frey, Passamaquoddy ash baskets have finally made the jump to being recognized as fine art. Museum pieces. Following stops at the Portland Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago, the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, CT now presents 'Jeremy Frey: Woven,' through September 7, 2025. The tour marks the artist's first solo museum exhibition and the first major retrospective of a Passamaquoddy artist presented at fine art museums in the U.S.
'Woven' offers a comprehensive exploration of Frey's 20-plus year career with more than 50 woven baskets crafted from natural materials like sweetgrass, cedar, spruce root, and porcupine quills. And, of course, ash. Brown ash to be specific–alternately known as black ash. Brown ash grows in wet areas resulting in a supple wood, perfect for peeling into thin strips then weaving into baskets.
But for how long?
While the emerald ash borer has yet to be found in the small town where Frey lives near Bangor, that is likely an inevitability. Frey, who sources all his own trees–tall and straight without branches on the trunk to interrupt the wood–has been taking from the forest a little more than needed for years, creating a reserve. A reserve of material for the continuance of his artmaking and the continuance of his culture should brown ash vanish from the forest.
'I've been to ground zero where (the emerald ash borer infestation) started and went out in the woods and saw what the devastation can be,' Frey told Forbes.com. 'Our creation legend is that we come from the ash tree, my people, and the basketry goes into that as well. It's a twofold hit. Then I think about how it all happened. Globalization. Commercialism. I'm just as responsible as anyone if you buy something that comes on a pallet that bug was in.'
Global commerce and consumerism and the transnational shipping it requires has spread invasive species around the world to devastating ecological and economic effect. In addition to the emerald ash borer, a partial list includes zebra mussels carried to the Great Lakes in shipping ballast, 'rat spills' in the Aleutian Islands, and stowaway brown tree snakes on Guam.
Frey shares a fatalistic perspective about what the loss of brown ash trees would mean to Passamaquoddy culture.
'I guess it's not any different from the thousands of other things we've lost, but if we came from a certain thing and it no longer exists, it's devastating, but it's not like Native people haven't been devastated a hundred thousand times before,' he said. 'We'll continue on. It's just another thing at this point. I hate to say it that way. I almost feel like, 'There goes another one,' but at the same time, if those legends are true, and if we actually came from a tree like that, that's another part of the Mother just gone. It's powerful being in the woods and harvesting them. It's one of my favorite parts of what I do. I know I'll miss that.' From Addiction To Adulation
Jeremy Frey (Passamaquoddy, b. 1978) 'Bluejay,' 2021. Black ash, cedar bark, birch bark, porcupine quills, natural undyed and aniline dyed porcupine quills, 12 x 9 in. Bruce Museum, Gift in memory of Maryann and Jay Chai, 2024.05.52.a - .b Paul Mutino
Frey didn't pick up weaving until his 20s despite the practice running seven generations deep in his family. He worked kitchen jobs. Long hours, little pay, getting high in his downtime to decompress. His addiction hadn't gotten so bad, however, that he couldn't recognize his life spiraling downward.
'It wasn't my plan,' Frey explained of his introduction to basket weaving. 'I came home to clean up. I just wanted to come home. My mother was learning to weave from an elder in the community at the time.'
That elder was Sylvia Gabriel (1929–2003).
Frey's mother, Gal Frey (b. 1957), had her own reasons for not wanting to embrace the family basketmaking tradition earlier in life.
'She was raised on the reservation before there was much support for the reservation,' Frey said. 'Everyone was very, very poor. My grandfather made baskets and he was a lobsterman. Sometimes to eat, the kids would have to work on baskets, and so it didn't have positive (associations).'
Basketmaking for Gal Frey wasn't an art project, 'It was a feed your brothers because they're hungry' project, in Jeremy Frey's words. 'That doesn't stir a lot of happy emotions.'
Gabriel passed the fundamentals of her 'point style' on to Gal Frey, who passed them on to her son.
'She asked me if I wanted to try. It was very frustrating at first, but I've done art my whole life,' Frey remembers. 'When I was younger, I sculpted, I carved, I painted, I drew. When me and my brother got together, rather than playing with toys, we'd draw stories, or we'd make characters out of clay, carve our own swords to sword fight. I used to make dinosaurs out of tin foil, brontosaurus.'
Mother and son were also instructed by the Maine Indian Basketmakers Alliance–an organization committed to resuscitating Wabanaki basketry.
Jeremy Frey found basketmaking, the time and concentration involved, a perfect and productive replacement for his addiction, idle hands being the devil's workshop and all that. A form of meditation. A therapy.
'I just buried myself into basketry and I replaced that obsession of drug use with an obsession of art, an obsession of weaving,' Frey said.
He was quickly rewarded. Attending smaller and then larger Native American art markets, his baskets sold.
'When I first came into the market, basketry was dying off, and it was being reintroduced through a few elders. Those elders were old, arthritic, their quality had come down. What they were teaching was a lower quality,' Frey said. 'Their students had learned from a teacher who wasn't at their peak anymore. There were a few very talented weavers, but for the most part, a lot had been lost.'
Sizing up the competition, Frey also recognized he needed to stand out to sell work.
'When I went to my first market, my instinct was to walk around the entire show and look at every single basket there. I had a few pieces that were just modeled after my mother's and they were not unique at all,' Frey said. 'I went home and started rethinking what was possible.'
His traditional basketmaking gradually evolved into contemporary fine art one tweak after another.
'One of the first things I did was I took the traditional weaves and I made them very tiny. So instead of having quarter inch weavers, they were like 32nd of an inch weavers,' Frey said. 'Then I had to find a way for that weave to support itself because it's so tiny, it could just collapse on itself. I had to learn about material preparation, material choice, the way that the ribs are laid. I had to basically redesign the traditional basket to suit the new designs. With that came the next thing and the next thing, the next thing. Every year I would bring something that no one had seen before. I did that for years.'
His baskets took the Native art scene by storm. In 2011, he was awarded Best in Show at the Southwestern Association for Indian Arts Indian Market in Santa Fe, the oldest, largest, and most prestigious exhibition of Indigenous art in the world. Frey became the first basket maker in the event's then 90-year history to do so. He'd also won Best in Show earlier that year at the Heard Museum Guild Indian Fair & Market in Phoenix–his first time entering–becoming only the second artist ever to accomplish that double play. In 2015, he again won Best in Show at the Heard, the second most prestigious Native American art fair, becoming the first artist to do so.
He wanted more. To reach more people. A wider audience beyond Native Art.
'That was a great way for me to get my work introduced to the world–I'm not knocking it in any way–but as an artist who is trying to put their soul into the world, I wanted to see my baskets, my art, (received) not as a Native's art–and again, I love all the support that that's given me–but I want to keep pushing, I want to make art that inspires everyone. If I knew a way that I could have art change the world, I want it to be profound, and I want it to still be a basket from the woods. I don't know how to do that, but wouldn't it be cool?' Basket Making Becomes Fine Art
Jeremy Frey (Passamaquoddy, born 1978), 'Loon' (detail), 2020, ash, cedar bark, porcupine quill on birch bark, and dye, 36 x 23 x 23 inches. Private collection of Catherine Stiefel, California. © Jeremy Frey. Eric Stoner
Early in his career, Frey developed a formula that produced income while feeding his desire to push the boundaries of creativity.
'I used to go to a show and I'd make one big piece, one of my favorite, big, complex pieces, and then I'd make a bunch of filler pieces so I could pay the bills. If I sell these four or five pieces, I'll get to the next show. I'll pay rent.' Frey explained. 'If (the big basket) didn't sell, at least I got to experiment, to try something new. Now, working in a gallery space, in the contemporary art world, having exposure, I can make just art pieces.'
Frey's success at the Native art markets led to representation in New York with Karma gallery, which put him on the mainstream contemporary art radar, ultimately leading to institutional interest, selling pieces to leading art museums around the country, as opposed to exclusively individual collectors.
'For me, it's freedom. It's freedom to create whatever I want to create versus making orders,' Frey said. 'Usually, when you do an order, especially with basketry, you're doing an order of something someone's already seen, and so your growth is slower because you're remaking things you've made before. I have no desire to sit on a design that exists. I get bored of my work if it doesn't get better. There has to be something brand new about a piece or I'm not thrilled. Working in this space I'm working in now, I'm able to be more imaginative.'
That imagination is spreading to other mediums. Frey has prints and a video on view in the exhibition as well. They'll never replace his baskets, and hopefully, they'll never need to. More From Forbes Forbes SWAIA Santa Fe Indian Market: The World's Greatest Art Fair By Chadd Scott Forbes Cara Romero's First Major Solo Museum Show Opening At Hood Museum Of Art By Chadd Scott Forbes Indigenous Group Of Seven Artworks Together Again At The Whyte Museum In Banff, Alberta By Chadd Scott