The Brooklyn Rail

Jeremy Frey’s Permanence at Karma includes various hand-woven ash, cedar, and sweetgrass Wabanaki baskets alongside several relief prints, where the baskets’ wedged ends are flanked into flattened axial cross-ligatures. Examples of aerial-view formalist exercises and Frey’s signature “urchin” baskets, cast in bronze, are also on view. The Stygian Obsidian (2026), for example, transmogrifies the paper-imprinted matrixial splint forms into tremendous, gear-like rosette patterns. The monochromatic dusted-celadon Urchin (2026) and coal-black bronze basket Twilight (2026) accentuate Frey’s piked forms; weighty and relic-like, their apexes score light across the vessel’s spurs and cast dramatic barbed shadows.

But the most impressive works remain, by dint of Frey’s masterful command of palette-based pairings and shifts, his natural fiber baskets. The Warrior and Monolith (both 2026) are exemplary cases in point. The former delimits cherry-red threads around robin’s egg rectangular parcels, combing this contrasting weft-warp latticework pattern around the basket, whose surface is adorned with chestnut-amber triangular prickles. The latter spicules are themselves twined with black ridges, a detail that facilitates a halo effect such that, viewed head-on, the basket’s chassis appears to cascade from lighter to darker-hued rims. The undyed segments, of which Frey makes felicitous use, heighten this optical shift. In the monumental, amphora-shaped Monolith, the lime-green cuneate quills are similarly set against undyed frets. Indeed, several baskets, such as Absence (2025), Sylvia (2026), and an untitled work from 2023, are entirely bereft of dye, which allows the viewer to appreciate Frey’s technical dexterity and formal command.

In order to properly assay Frey’s baskets, one must contend with two related points—one philosophical/conceptual and the other historical. On the first count, the critic must consider Frey’s works as being, definitionally, purposive wares. For although the so-called “fancy baskets” are exceptional in this regard (as they are primarily objects of visual delectation rather than use-value), they are nevertheless taxonomically conditioned by still belonging to the wholly utilitarian “basket” category. When appraising a beautiful utilitarian object, one must consider how its usability relates to its aesthetic qualities, as the philosopher Lord Shaftesbury first observed in his 1711 Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, therein galvanizing a debate that has endured throughout modernist aesthetics. As Immanuel Kant famously delineated in “Analytic of the Beautiful,” from the Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), works of “fine art” are grounded by our judging them as “purposiveness without an end,” meaning that we judge fine artworks as subjectively purposive, or “entirely independent of the representation of the good.” The “good” allotted to what Kant calls “objective purposiveness” consists in adhering to a determinate conceptual end, which belongs to the aesthetic object’s form. Given Frey’s considered interest in the basket’s shape, which he isolates in his relief prints and their bronze counterparts, he is acutely attuned to this principle. For in these works, we find Frey deracinating the means-end form (i.e., the three-dimensionally manifest shape) from the coeval matter (i.e., the color and internal composition).

Utility is a necessary but insufficient condition for an artifactual object to be beautiful. Regardless of how ornately it is adorned, the hammer, for instance, must have a face that permits the means-end teleological use of hammering if it is to be a successful example of its kind. The same concept applies to Frey’s baskets, as the artisan-cum-artist resolutely regards them as belonging to an Indigenous history of serviceable basketry, a point that Frey underscores by explicitly drawing from Wabanaki material and ornamental traditions. This includes his use of black ash and sweetgrass, materials Indigenous weavers preferred due to their durability. Functionally speaking, Frey’s baskets certainly are good instances of their kind. They permit storage of goods, and the lids are tightly fitted, meaning that they would be well designed to protect foodstuffs or valuables from the elements. Small, circular finial handles on the lids facilitate the user’s readily opening and closing the vessel. They are also proportionate. Frey, as a seventh-generation weaver, entwines his baskets using wooden puzzle molds, around which he plaits. He is thus attentive not only to the decorative-aesthetic facets but also to utility-attuned principles like symmetry and uniformity.

This discussion is by no means an arbitrary philosophical point. Reflecting on her discussions with “elderly basket makers,” Frey’s mentor, Theresa Secord, recounts in her 2024 essay “Evolution of an Artist and the Oldest Art Form in New England” that the Wabanaki did not use the word “artist,” such that “[if] it was mentioned, they would wonder who I was talking about.” To forgo the relevant artisanal-technical principles would detract from Frey’s baskets and their status as trans-generationally implicated vessels.

To be an aesthetic exemplar within a utilitarian kind, however, requires innovating within the bounds of the subtending utilitarian form. Facilitating hammering does not, on its own, make for a beautiful hammer; it is the aesthetic component that distinguishes the admirable, long-shafted, fifteenth-century French hammer in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection from an Estwing hammer sold at hardware stores. The particular tradition that Frey is working within is implicated in a transgenerational Indigenous history, the form’s possibilities conditioned by how Wabanaki basketry has been traditionally cultivated. His practice attends to aesthetic innovation by espying the practical-functional history informing Wabanaki basketry. Frey, who began working as a weaver around 2000, sources his material by trekking to the woods near his Maine home—not far from the reservation where he grew up—and harvesting brown ash trees that he blunts and splints into strips using a splitter, following a time-honored procedure. Removing the bark, Frey is able to separate and release the growth ring.

His process draws from traditions passed down to him by his mother, Frances “Gal” Frey; his uncle Fred “Moose” Moore, Jr.; his grandfather, Fred Moore, Sr.; and Secord. His colorist proclivity is informed by his wife Ganesse Frey’s Penobscot miniature baskets, which intertwist thin, variegated ash splits. As Secord writes, one can also detect Sylvia Gabriel's intergenerational influence, mediated through her pupil, Frances, in Frey’s “porcupine weave.” She also underscores that “Jeremy still uses a knife as his primary tool for cutting and scraping the wood, as is traditional and how he was taught,” unlike numerous “contemporary basket makers [who] use scissors.”

Frey’s preference for the “fancy basket” style, traditionally executed by women Wabanaki basket-weavers, is another example of his innovating. With the exception of Lawrence (Billy) Shay, Secord highlights, “men, including Jeremy’s grandfather (who was alive at the time Jeremy began weaving), were still accustomed to weaving the work baskets, used in hunting, fishing, and other traditional practices.” In deploying the fine weave lining his urchin-shaped and porcupine-pointed baskets, Frey also revived a practice that had disappeared in the early twentieth century.

Frey’s work has, for over a decade, received its due approbation. In an early 2011 showcase, his work was lauded (and granted a significant cash prize) at the venerated Santa Fe Indian Market. The same year, he was given the Best of Show title at the annual Heard Museum Guild Indian Fair & Market in Phoenix. His commanding urchin baskets were placed in the permanent collections of institutions like the Art Institute of Chicago and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. This exhibition provides a rare instance in which one may view an exemplary demonstration of aesthetic innovation that not only takes place within the bounds of an intergenerational traditional plexus but refigures itself by plumbing that very genealogy.