CHICAGO, IL.- The Art Institute of Chicago is presenting Jeremy Frey: Woven on view from October 26, 2024 through February 10, 2025. The exhibition is a mid-career retrospective of the work of Jeremy Frey, a seventh-generation Passamaquoddy basketmaker, and includes more than 50 baskets crafted over two decades.

Frey painstakingly creates his baskets from ash wood, with sweetgrass, birch bark, cedar bark, and porcupine quillwork. The lead piece in the exhibition, Nearly Monochrome, was acquired by the Art Institute for its permanent collection in 2022. Measuring over 31 inches tall, this towering vessel exemplifies Frey’s immense ambition and commitment to detail, which is apparent throughout the show. Visitors will delight in exploring the dynamic shapes, myriad textures, and dramatic colors of Frey’s extraordinary body of work.

“Frey truly is an artist’s artist, who continually, meticulously, and systematically redefines his practice to imaginative and unexpected ends,” said Andrew James Hamilton, associate curator of Arts of the Americas at the Art Institute of Chicago. “This show highlights how Frey has transformed the long-standing art form of ash basketmaking into something beautifully—exquisitely—his own.”

This exhibition marks the debut of Frey’s recent experimentations with other media. The works chart his development as an artist dedicated to elaborating and expanding this time-honored Native art form into print making and video. Frey has developed ways of using his baskets as matrices for printmaking and has created his first time-based-media work, Ash, a visual meditation on the art of ash basketmaking.

Jeremy Frey: Woven is organized by the Portland Museum of Art, Maine, where it was curated by Ramey Mize, associate curator of American art, Portland Museum of Art, Maine, and Jaime DeSimone, chief curator at the Farnsworth Art Museum. Theresa Secord, a Penobscot basketmaker and founding director of the Maine Indian Basketmakers Alliance, served as a cultural consultant for the exhibition. The catalog Jeremy Frey: Woven was published by Rizzoli.

The presentation at the Art Institute of Chicago is organized by Andrew Hamilton, associate curator, Arts of the Americas.