PBS News Hour

AMNA NAWAZ: The ancient native tradition of weaving baskets is now grabbing the attention of the contemporary art world, with one artist taking the form in new directions.

Jeffrey Brown takes us to Maine for our arts and culture series, Canvas.

JEREMY FREY, Artist: That one right there is a large, healthy brown ash.

You see how similar it looks to the white?

JEFFREY BROWN: A walk in the woods near his Eddington, Maine, home with Jeremy Frey in search of brown ash trees, whose pliable wood has made them so valued in the Wabanaki Indian basket making tradition for centuries and for Frey today.

JEREMY FREY: So that right there is a perfect basket tree.

You see how straight it is?

There's no knots, no branches.

I will be making a basket out of that someday.

JEFFREY BROWN: You will?

JEREMY FREY: Yes.

JEFFREY BROWN: These days, the fruits of Frey's work can be found in very different settings, art museums, in a first major survey titled Woven at the Portland Museum of Art, as well as in the collections of leading institutions, including New York's Metropolitan Museum, baskets of different sizes, shapes, patterns, colors made over the last 20 years, featuring innovations and refinements Frey introduced, such as fine weaves and double wall baskets, one within another.

JEREMY FREY: If you duck way down, there's color under there that you can never see.

JEFFREY BROWN: Oh, I didn't see that.

JEREMY FREY: I just did that for me.

(LAUGHTER) JEFFREY BROWN: All of it building on centuries of knowledge and craft.

JEREMY FREY: Weaving is so simple.

It's up, down, over and under.

I mean, it's this simple binary process.

Like, you get your ones, you get your zeros.

And how do you make that more?

JEFFREY BROWN: The making of baskets, weaving, has been going on for a long, long time all over the world.

JEREMY FREY: Yes.

Yes.

JEFFREY BROWN: You like being part of that history?

JEREMY FREY: I do like being part of that history.

But I had this thought the other day that, in thousands or tens of thousands of years of nearly every culture in the world doing this, no one's ever done what I have done.

JEFFREY BROWN: Frey refers to the baskets as woven sculptures.

And for this exhibition, he's also played with form in new ways, creating flat prints, a kind of basket vortex that spirals into the wall, and a video capturing the making and fiery loss of a basket.

JEREMY FREY: I have this duality going.

I want to exist as a contemporary artist, but I also have a Native side to me that is always going to be present, and this work comes directly from that.

And it's like balancing that, doing that in a respectful way, is important, but also stating that this is me.

JEFFREY BROWN: A member of the Passamaquoddy Nation, Frey grew up on the Indian Township Reservation near Maine's border with Canada.

He can trace basket making back seven generations in his family.

In his studio, there are baskets made by his grandfather.

But Frey himself didn't come to it until his 20s, when he sought to get past a rough time of drug use that had begun in his teens.

Drug abuse would lead to the loss of many of his friends.

His mother, also a basket maker, suggested he take up weaving to keep focused and busy.

JEREMY FREY: I just needed to reset my life.

I remember it being very frustrating.

It was probably partially what I was going through, but also just trying to learn these techniques.

And the tension of the wood tends to want to spring apart at times.

JEFFREY BROWN: Sort of a metaphor for life, isn't it?

JEREMY FREY: It really is.

JEFFREY BROWN: When you're telling me what you're going through at that time, resetting your own life.

JEREMY FREY: Yes.

Yes, and challenging myself at the same time.

I didn't know it at the time, but I think the act of weaving kind of helped save my life.

JEFFREY BROWN: Learned traditional techniques and then began developing his own, every basket a result of weeks and months of work, pounding, spraying, scraping, splitting, gauging, cutting, dying, weaving.

In addition to ash, he works with sweetgrass for braiding, cedar bark, and porcupine quills for the tops of baskets.

All of it, he's gathered or harvested himself.

Why is it important to do it this way, come into the woods, find the exact right... JEREMY FREY: For me -- so, some people buy their material.

But, for me, I find that when you harvest your own material, there's something spiritual about that, but, beyond that, you get the exact quality you want.

Having that connection, it's part of basketry.

JEFFREY BROWN: He learned first from elders, including members of the Maine Indian Basketmakers Alliance, a group intent on preserving and furthering the craft.

He began taking his work to craft markets and fairs, gaining attention and winning prizes, including, in 2011, best in show at the renowned Santa Fe Indian Market.

And then the art world, eager to expand its boundaries of contemporary art, began to take notice.

The Portland Museum of Art's Ramey Mize is co-curator of this show.

RAMEY MIZE, Portland Museum of Art: Baskets of this kind were seen within the dichotomy and a sort of perceived hierarchy of art and craft, art versus craft.

And so much of what Jeremy Frey is doing is attuning people to the extraordinary vision and genius behind these works that absolutely deserves to be considered within a -- quote, unquote -- "fine art" context, but not abandoning the incredible craft, roots and processes that bring it to life.

JEFFREY BROWN: But even as basketry begins to reach new and growing museum audiences, it faces an existential threat from the emerald ash borer, an invasive beetle that's decimating North America's ash trees.

JEREMY FREY: As what I'm doing as an artist peaks, I'm going to lose the material to actually do it.

You can tell the same story with another material, but it won't be the same story.

You can still make the image look similar, but it doesn't have the history, it doesn't have the cultural significance.

The material isn't going to necessarily behave the same way.

JEFFREY BROWN: For now, Frey is harvesting more trees than he needs and storing them against a grim future, while also enjoying the attention he's getting in what he admits is a very unexpected, even surreal present, including the packed opening for this exhibition.

JEREMY FREY: It was intense.

It was overwhelming.

It still doesn't really feel like it happened.

Like, I'm still -- I mean, I don't know.

I mean, at the end of the day, I just feel like a guy in his studio making baskets.

So, yes, it's pretty cool.

JEFFREY BROWN: The next stop for Jeremy Frey's exhibition Woven is at the Art Institute of Chicago, where it opens October 26.

For the "PBS News Hour," I'm Jeffrey Brown in Portland and Eddington, Maine.