Thursday, November 14 | 18:00–19:00
Speak
Jeremy Frey. Collection of Dr. and Mrs. Ari and Lea Plosker. © Jeremy Frey. Image courtesy of Eric Stoner.
Delicate, intricate and twisted, the vessels that Jeremy Frey weaves from the heavy wood of ash trees are an astonishing sight.
Born in 1978 and raised on the Passamaquoddy Indian Reservation in Maine, Frey comes from a long line of distinguished basket weavers and draws on his heritage to inform the formal language of his work, while radically renewing these time-honored forms and techniques to masterfully create objects of unprecedented complexity and elegance.
Meet artist Jeremy Frey and curator Andrew Hamilton for a conversation about the first museum exhibition of Frey’s work, Jeremy Frey: Woven– a mid-career retrospective show showcasing both the time-honored art form of Passamaquoddy basketry and the way he transformed it into something entirely his own.
About the artist
Jeremy Frey (born 1978, Passamaquoddy Indian Township Reservation, Maine) is one of the foremost Passamaquoddy artisans of his generation. A descendant of a long line of Native American weavers, Frey learned traditional Wabanaki weaving techniques from his mother and through training with the Maine Indian Basketmakers Alliance.
Frey works with tried and tested materials such as ash wood and lady’s mantle, introduces new forms and techniques and thus creates his very own art.
Frey won the Best of Show award at the Santa Fe Indian Market in 2011, the first time in the market’s 90-year history that a basket maker had received this honor. That same year, Frey won the Best of Show award at the Heard Museum Indian Guild Fair and Market in Phoenix, Arizona. He repeated this in 2015, becoming the first artist ever to do so.
Frey’s works are in the public collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Museum of the American Indian, the Denver Art Museum, and the Portland Museum of Art, Maine, among others.
If you have any questions about programming, please contact [email protected].
Closed captioning will be available for this program. For questions regarding accessibility accommodations, please email [email protected].
