Don’t miss 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.
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.