Together, Theresa Secord and Jeremy Frey have forever changed the craft of Wabanaki basket making. Their combined expertise has not only grown the number of makers working within their traditional craft, it has also increased the visibility of the art form like never before. In fact, just after this conversation took place, Jeremy was awarded the prestigious MacArthur grant for his basket making. In this conversation, the artist-friends discuss the importance of mentorship and what distinguishes it from teaching. Along the way, they also share their evolution as makers and stress the existential need for their art form to continue to evolve in the face of its greatest threat: the invasive emerald ash borer beetle. 

Kate Blair: I’d love to hear more about how the two of you met and developed your mentor/mentee relationship. I’m also curious: what have you learned from each other over the years?

Theresa Secord: I knew Jeremy's mother, Gal Frey, as a friend, and she was one of the early apprentices in the traditional arts apprenticeship program that had been in place with the Maine Indian Basketmakers Alliance. Our founding was in 1993 with this core group of about fifty-five elders who wanted to make sure basketry continued in all four federally recognized tribes. 

We required a lot of people to help with our community basketry workshops, where as many as twenty of us would teach up to eighty community members everything in the entire process of basketry, from the processing of the log pounding, to the splitting of the wood, to braiding sweetgrass, to then making. Gal asked me if I would hire Jeremy, her son, to come help us pound and split the ash wood. That's a big, heavy job. 

Fifty bucks to help us split the wood and fifty bucks for gas or something like that. He had been selling baskets to and through the tribe, but I think I wrote his first professional check from an organization.

That was it. We really became friends almost instantly. Jeremy was learning to make baskets with his mother, so he was already making baskets when we met. I didn't teach Jeremy, but I became a professional development mentor. He could see that I had resources, and I knew people and systems. I wanted to help plug young basket makers into opportunities. That's my side of the story.

Jeremy: When you talk about mentor versus teacher, I mean, a mentor is a teacher, but one of the things that impacted my work greatly that Theresa brought to the table was connecting artists. Her ability to source out funding and grants trickled down to anyone who was an artist who wanted to go after things like that. She always knew exactly where to go and was willing to help

Theresa was always encouraging me to go out West and to do these bigger shows. Eventually, a group of us went out to Santa Fe Indian Market as demonstrators. It also allowed all of us to see that it wasn't quite as daunting as you might think.

The things that I've learned from you, Theresa, are just as important as the things I learned from my mother. It all works together; when you think back on it, I guess we're just always learning.

Theresa: We saw that the basket makers that were learning in the traditional arts apprenticeship program needed marketing opportunities if they were going to continue the art form.

Jeremy: From my perspective, there's two different groups. It's your traditionalists that want to learn the basketry, but they want to do what their grandparents did. Then you had the small group of people that wanted to push the art form in a different direction, get maximum exposure, innovate.

Theresa: That's a really good point.

Jeremy: And I was one of those. In doing what I was doing and what we were doing as a team, I wanted to spread the name of Northeastern baskets across the country and even across the world. And it all, even the traditionalists, now impacts what they're able to do.

Theresa: I'll say too how key Jeremy was to the continued work of the Maine Indian Basketmakers Alliance, in particular, the funding aspect, which is really big for a small grassroots nonprofit. It took us until almost that ten-year mark before we started to see that we had lowered the age of average basket makers from sixty-three to forty and increased numbers from around fifty founding members to around a hundred. It takes a number of years for someone to become a basket maker and to have that commitment was key.

When Jeremy started making baskets, most of us were making our grandparents’ baskets. The styles that the founders of the Maine Indian Basketmakers Alliance were weaving were styles from the late 1800s, like the Victorian times. And Jeremy came along and kind of busted that whole thing wide open. That was key for the Maine Basketmakers Alliance because funders wanted to see progress. They don't want to keep funding the same thing over and over again. He was our first big success story. This is when the tide really shifted and he became extremely helpful to me.

Jeremy: Baskets are one of the oldest things people have made, ever. Everyone knows what a basket is. Then you see work like mine, you know exactly what it is, but at the same time, you've never seen anything like it. It's something that you love, and it's been in your life. It's been in everyone's life. It's part of humanity. But at the same time, something you don't understand. So you put those two things together and you get this kind of interesting magic. 

Here, Jeremy takes the camera to his yard where Theresa's son, Caleb, is working on a log. He has been an apprentice with Jeremy for several years now.

Theresa: I taught Caleb to make baskets when he was little. In an interview, he said, “My mom taught me to make baskets. Jeremy Frey taught me to make art.” That really does explain the difference in what we're talking about. I'm a generation older than Jeremy, but also followed along as a traditional practitioner. And now I would say I'm an artist. I mean, United States Artists gave me an artist fellowship!

But I remember when basket makers would be in the room thirty years ago and you would mention the word “artist” and they would look around. They had no idea who we were talking about when we used that word.

Jeremy: I always battled internally with the idea of craft versus art. A lot of my early designs were based around the idea of making craft into art in some way without losing what it came from or what it was. I made a basket that was completely nonfunctional. I said, well, maybe that's art. A lot of my innovation came from the idea that I had to prove that I wasn't making craft. Nowadays I don't even care. But then when I was sort of gestating, I felt “craft” was a negative word for what I was doing.

Theresa: Yeah, I think we all had to fight that stigma because when I was in college in the 1970s, people joked about “basket making 101.” That was synonymous for taking something easy. I just think about that years later and how funny that is. It's not that easy to make baskets. And you see at the level Jeremy's at, it's incredible.

Jeremy: I was nominated for the Loewe Craft Prize, and they shipped [the nominees] over to Paris and put on a show. I remember distinctly just having this epiphany moment where I was walking through and looking at everything, and I said, these pieces are all fine art, but Loewe is deliberately calling it the Craft Prize. And I realized they were challenging the exact same thing I was challenging, but they were letting you make that decision. They were putting fine art in your face and calling it craft. 

Kate: That was something I wanted to talk about actually, the distinction between craft and or your feelings on it generally. It seems like we are in a place where craft and high art — quote-un-quote — are occupying the same territory.

Jeremy: That's new. Right. There are some amazing artists that make things that can bring you to tears, but they can do these things in a day or twenty minutes. It's just the way that they put things together and the way they use color. My most elaborate pieces can take me six months. When you're crafting something, you're building it from nothing. That doesn't take away from the fact that it's high art, it's just that it's crafted. 

One of the things I've been doing recently is color studies. When you're painting, you're on a flat surface. When you're weaving, you can change the shape of the canvas, you can make it multidimensional. Your weave can cover up color or expose color. So in many ways, I have a little bit of an advantage on making optical illusions or making the play of color because of the way you can make color appear much more vibrant in certain areas of the piece and completely almost disappear. It's all just perspective, which you just can't do with a painting.

Theresa: You're even taking it to new levels, levels that no one thought about before. Some of your baskets are true optical illusions in scale and symmetry. But it's so interesting to hear about the color.

Jeremy: The first few pieces that had that iridescence were accidental. I said, okay, well now what if I actually deliberately use this and work on it more and find out what shape will make that come out more? I try and make them not overly woven or elaborate, but when you view them as a whole, they become more than the sum of their parts.

Kate: To finish, I’d love to hear about what's animating your practices right now. Is there anything specific that you're thinking about or that's inspiring you? 

Theresa: I have in the last couple years been experimenting with using my basketry to say some things. I turned sixty-five a couple of years ago and I thought, I don't work for anybody. I can say what I want now. And then in recent political times, what better time? 

One basket celebrated the return of the Atlantic sturgeon to the Penobscot River. I made this basket that people could envision, not that it literally looks like a fish, but you could see the scales of the sturgeon on it and the color scheme. And one reflecting the color change in the Gulf of Maine that Bigelow laboratory researchers are seeing due to the warming of the Gulf of Maine. 

This year, I worked on the “Democracy” series. My first basket in a series called “Democracy is Fragile,” and it's a fraying American flag on top of this basket. That was really cool because I didn't know if I could express contemporary issues that concerned me in this wood and grass medium, and I wanted to show that to next generation basket makers too.

The thing I realized is I do a lot of service work and I feel like I really want to do some more of my own art. I'm not going to abandon my service work. The advocacy has been really good and important and impactful, but I want to have time to use my own voice and my own creativity going forward.

So what are you working on, Jeremy? 

Jeremy: There's a whole list of stuff. Color was a big one. Now I'm working on doing some 2D work, which is woven wall stuff. I want to start working in metals a little more. I'm going to be weaving softer metals. Eventually, I want to go into welding softer metals to look like weaves. 

I'm also working with a company now to create large outdoor stuff for bronze castings of pieces, which turned out to be way harder than I thought it was going to be, just because of the way the material is and the value of the work. That's been a challenge, but it's also been a fun learning experience.

When I did my show, I put a video together where I make this basket from scratch and you go from the woods right to the gallery, and then when you put it in the gallery, it lights on fire and burns to nothing. And there's no voiceover, no music. I'm mostly there as just the facilitator of the creation, not the artist. The idea was you get to follow the basket through its whole life. I was just thinking of what art is and what it's meant to do.

And obviously I'm always trying to make a new basket that I've never made before. That's always going to be some of what I do. I've been working in print using flat weaves as a plate. It's been fun to just diversify.

Theresa: If we haven't made it clear, we're losing all of the source of our weaving material due to the emerald ash borer beetle killing all of the trees in Maine, so Jeremy talking about diversifying into other materials is really critical, particularly for his generation. I'm actually purchasing wood from some of the processing and keeping it in a freezer for my future weaving. 

The Anonymous Was a Woman grant was fairly modest, but really impactful. I think it will allow me to focus on purchasing archival papers and starting to incorporate that into my basketry. The late Shan Goshon, great Cherokee weaver, wove with archival paper and another Eastern Band of Cherokee artist friend of mine was showing me some of her work recently. So it can be done.

I don't love it, but in order to leave my legacy behind, and also even if we lose the ash trees, as the foresters are predicting for a generation or two, there could be a continuous group of us still weaving through other mediums and materials until that comes back, until the trees come back. It is quite dire, but I guess it's causing us to be pretty creative. 

Jeremy: Yeah, it is. I've got this sneaky thing I've been doing where I have so much material stockpiled, I think I will be one of the last people weaving in ash. I have twenty years worth put away. That was something I started ten years ago, and I've just been doing it ever since. I harvest way more than I use. So every year, I add a few more years.

I spent the last twenty-six years of my life striving for perfection in what I do. And it was really when I first heard about the emerald ash borer and realized how bad it was, I just was like, man, this is my life's work, and the only thing I can use to make it is going to be gone. It was a really sad moment for me, and it came on slower than I thought. Diversification is one of the things, but also just preparing for the inevitable.

I don't think any of my other art forms will ever touch what I've done with baskets. I just don't see how I could make such a splash. That's kind of bad, but kind of cool.

Theresa: We're in mourning for this tree and ecological loss that we're undergoing. And it's been really emotional and stressful the last few years to wait for it. We knew it was coming. We've known it's been coming for more than twenty years, and now that it's here, just to try to diversify and how to be resilient with it is the challenge now.