Bruce Presents: Jeremy Frey: Woven, A Panel Discussion
Wednesday, June 4, 2025, Gale and Robert H. Lawrence, Jr., and Pamela and Robert Goergen Auditorium
Bruce Presents: Jeremy Frey: Woven, a panel discussion
6:00-Wine reception
Discussion:–6:30-7:30
Jeremy Frey (b. 1978, Passamaquoddy Indian Township Reservation, Maine) is one of the foremost Passamaquoddy craftspeople of his generation. A descendant of a long line of Indigenous weavers, Frey learned traditional Wabanaki methods from his mother and by apprenticing at the Maine Indian Basketmakers Alliance. Woven from natural materials that the artist himself forages, such as sweetgrass and wood from black ash trees, Frey’s vessels are characterized by subtle forms, delicately layered colors, and elaborate weaves. Building on and experimenting with the material histories of Wabanaki basketry, his work is also in dialogue with contemporary sculpture’s emphasis on materiality, form, and variation within repetition. To create his basket relief prints, Frey has developed a novel form of flat weaving that can be run repeatedly through a printing press, preserving and sharing his techniques without impacting the stock of his rare materials. Frey lives in Maine.
The first solo show of Frey’s work was held at Karma, New York, in 2023. His first institutional solo exhibition, Jeremy Frey: Woven, which debuted in 2024 at the Portland Museum of Art, Maine, was on view at the Art Institute of Chicago through February 2025. In June 2025, Woven will travel to the Bruce Museum, Greenwich, Connecticut. As a 2024 finalist for the Loewe Foundation Craft Prize, Frey was included in The Celebration of Craft, a group exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo. Other recent group exhibitions include Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2024); Baltimore Museum of Art (2024); North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh (2024); Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington, DC (2022); and deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, Massachusetts (2022). He is the first two-time winner of Best of Show at the Heard Museum Indian Guild Fair and Market in Phoenix, Arizona. Frey’s work is held in the public collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; Denver Art Museum, Colorado; Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, Maine; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Portland Museum of Art, Maine; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; University of Delaware Special Collections & Museums; and Virginia Museum of Fine Art, Richmond, among others.
Jeremy Frey, artist
Jeremy Frey (Passamaquoddy, b. 1978)
Blue Point Urchin, 2016
Ash, sweetgrass, and dye, 5 x 9 x 9 in.
Collection of Dr. and Mrs. Ari and Lea Plosker
© Jeremy Frey. Image courtesy Eric Stoner
Jaime DeSimone is the Chief Curator at the Farnsworth Art Museum, specializing in contemporary art. She has held curatorial roles at the Portland Museum of Art (ME), MOCA Jacksonville, and the Addison Gallery of American Art. DeSimone has curated over 40 exhibitions, including Ann Craven: Painted Time (2020–2024) (2025), Anne Buckwalter: Manors (2025), Sue de Beer: The White Wolf (2024), Jeremy Frey: Woven (2024, co-curator), Flying Woman: The Paintings of Katherine Bradford (2022), North Atlantic Triennial (2022), and Carrie Moyer and Sheila Pepe: Tabernacles for Trying Times (2020), and Ragnar Kjartansson: Scenes from Western Culture (2019), among others. A recipient of the 2019 Curatorial Research Fellowship from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, she was also a Fulbright Arctic Initiative scholar (2021–2023). She holds degrees in art history from American University (MA) and Bates College (BA).
Ramey Mize is associate curator of American art at the Portland Museum of Art. She specializes in art of the Americas from the nineteenth century to the present day, with a focus on cultural exchange, expressions of place, and the intersections between U.S. and Indigenous art. Her curatorial practice is dedicated to expanding the field, notably through the reinstallation project Passages in American Art (2023). Before joining the PMA, Mize was the Lois and Arthur Stainman Research Assistant in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s American Wing, where she supported the exhibition Winslow Homer: Crosscurrents (2022). In 2020–21, she was the Met’s Douglass Foundation Fellow and a participant in the Center for Curatorial Leadership / Mellon Foundation Seminar in Curatorial Practice. Previously, she held curatorial positions at the Colby College Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Her research and curatorial work have also been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Terra Foundation for American Art, among others. She holds a BA from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, an MA from the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, and a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania.
