“Jeremy Frey: Woven” at the Portland Museum of Art (through Sept. 15) is hands-down a spectacular exhibition. Frey is a seventh-generation Passamaquoddy basket weaver, a lofty achievement on its own. But it is also, the PMA website notes, “the first-ever retrospective of a Wabanaki artist in a fine art museum in the United States” (more on the phrase “in the United States” in a moment), which in itself makes this a groundbreaking event.

But by putting two decades’ worth of his baskets (over 50 of them!) in this rarefied setting, the exhibition raises many interesting questions and contemplations. Does the setting alone confer the imprimatur of fine art? If not, what actually elevates Frey’s work beyond what his ancestors created? And then there is the perennial (and perennially tedious) debate of what the difference is between “craft” and “art.”

In his earliest conversations with then-PMA curator Jaime DeSimone as the show began taking shape (DeSimone has since left for the Farnsworth and the show is co-curated by Ramey Mize, the PMA’s assistant curator of American art), Frey made it clear that he wanted this retrospective to be “an art show” rather than simply a Wabanaki basketry show. And indeed, we get more than baskets (the exhibition includes prints, installation and a video, for example).

“I have been trying to transcend traditional basket weaving for years,” Frey said during a recent conversation. Here is where the phrase “in the United States” comes in. The need to make a distinction between art and craft is a peculiarly Euro-American one, a seemingly unsolvable deliberation for as long as I’ve been writing about both. (In the 1980s and early 1990s, I wrote primarily about craft during what was then one of the cyclical flowerings of the studio craft movement, which began after World War II and has come in and out of vogue and manifestation ever since.)

But other cultures, notably those of China and Japan, do not indulge in such distinctions. Japan, in fact, designates what we would call master craftspeople – ceramicists, basket makers, wood turners and so on – national treasures. So, is there really a point where craft apotheosizes into “fine” art? One plausible short answer might be “never,” because at the root of what we tend to call craft is, intractably, the material itself: wood, clay, glass, fiber et al. We could say that material is its raison d’etre, no matter how functional or nonfunctional the result (another comparison people like to cite as an explanation of categorical difference). It begins, always, with material as primary focus, where as a lot of fine art uses materials as an end to expression, its primary goal.

My view – and it is just an opinion – is that craft can transmute into art in two primary ways: first, when it involves ideas rather than just process (as with someone like Faith Ringgold), and second, when an artist takes the medium to a whole new level. I think of André Masson developing the automatism that birthed the Surrealists or Helen Frankenthaler’s and Morris Lewis’ stain paintings, where they allowed diluted paint to seep and bleed into unprepared canvases and, in so doing, invented a new abstract expressionist genre we refer to as Color Field painting.

In the case of Frey, this latter point is incontestable. Among Frey’s many innovations, all in pursuit of elevating a traditional craft, are braiding cedar bark and ash; creating double weaves that result in what looks like one basket outside and another inside; asymmetrical collars formed on the bias around vessel openings; exploiting quillwork for representational ends by using them to depict birds, mountain lions and sunsets on the lids of baskets rather than just geometric designs decorating the sides; first downscaling baskets by ultra-refining his materials, then upscaling them to be waste high; creating new mold forms, sometimes several for a single basket, and pioneering new techniques to achieve these monumentally sized works.

It’s my contention that the show should be considered an “art” show just based on how Frey’s feverish mind is always working overtime in trying to create a new effect or texture. Is there a substantial difference between this and abstract art that seeks to elicit certain emotions through a mixing of colors and textures (stippling, scumbling, dripping, thickening an impasto, scraping, washing or hurling paint at the canvas)? Why would we think of them as not the same?

It is not, then, the presence of these baskets in a “fine” art museum that elevates them, but their own integral expression of material, process and innovation that ennobles them. Yet Frey is also working with ideas here, specifically the passing of time. At a lecture he gave the day of the opening, he described the process of peeling a tree, layer by layer, as going back through time. The process literally works its way from last year’s growth to much older growth. Not to mention that he is bringing an age-old woodland tradition into the present, or the fact that what he does moves him and his creative process through time too (it can take anywhere from one week to six months for Frey to make a basket, not counting materials harvesting).

Frey’s pieces also have an environmental urgency to them in the sense that his primary material, ash – he also uses renewable sweetgrass, birchbark, the porcupine quills, roots, etc. – is being devastated by an invasive beetle, the emerald ash borer. When we view a Frey basket, we are also contemplating the possible extinction of an art form.

Which is not to say, of course, that the other works Frey has made for the show, using what we might think of as more traditional art practices, is not welcome. The prints are beautifully executed from the flat skeletal beginnings of basket forms that are inked in different colors and run through the press (a video shows him making them). Black-and-white prints (that is, white weaving patterns pressed onto black paper) are handsome and elegant in a minimalistic sort of way.

And the video work seems to address, if in oblique ways, some of the questions posed earlier in this review. It seems pretty documentary for most of its 11 minutes. We see Frey traipsing into the woods, finding an ash tree, cutting it down, pounding and peeling it, then weaving an exquisite lidded basket. It is what comes next that surprises and challenges the viewer. With great intention and care, Frey places it on a pedestal in what looks like a museum setting. Suddenly it begins to smoke and eventually burn until it is completely destroyed.

What could this mean? Its ambiguity might imply many things. It could be a mordant critique of how long it took for museum audiences to appreciate it as an art form – essentially a caustic joke similar to the Bansky painting that self-shredded after fetching $1.4 million at auction and was later resold, shredding and all, for $25.4 million.

It might be a commentary on the impossibility of “owning” or “valuing” an art form that belongs to the Native communities who created it. Frey’s baskets might now be “collectible,” but simply purchasing a basket does not mean you have a right to its soul or the soul of its maker (a truism Native Americans, tragically, have had to learn by experience). At a cosmic level, it may also be articulating how all forms in the universe – whether common objects and art, whether existential concept or life itself – are ultimately ephemeral. Everything goes in the end, disappearing into a mystery we cannot know until we are subsumed by it.

At his lecture, Frey said, “I’ve always been a Native basket maker in a market, but I wanted to be a contemporary artist in a museum … getting to a broader market and being valued as an artist.” By the looks of “Woven,” Frey has more than achieved his goal.

Jorge S. Arango has written about art, design and architecture for over 35 years. He lives in Portland. He can be reached at: jorge@jsarango.com 

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