Sunday Funday: Wabanaki Artist Jeremy Frey's Solo Exhibit at the Portland Museum of Art

JJ is, as you may know, a visual artist. On the advice of a few of their teachers, respectively, I’ve never enrolled them in lessons. They take classes at school, but mostly they work on their own, in their room.

Right before the pandemic hit, JJ’s art teacher chose one of their pieces to represent their intermediate school at an annual exhibit at the Portland Museum of Art that features a pieces of art by students representing every public schools in Maine. The exhibit itself was AMAZING. But pretty much the day after we attended the opening, our country went into Covid lockdown mode, and we never made it back to the museum to contemplate the fact JJ had a piece hanging in this museum.

This Sunday, I’m thinking about the perfect outing. This exhibit (which I saw on opening night) is truly incredible. This artist is continuing the tradition of his people, the Passamaquody, in making these baskets. The baskets themselves are incredible objects of craft and beauty.

What really blew me away at this exhibit is a movie they produced that shows Frey’s process from beginning to end: he cuts the ash tree down himself, carries it back to his house himself, he pounds the bark and peals the wood from the trunk, he strips it down to create the pieces that he’ll weave into the basket. Every single bit of it is a physical process.

It is also a solitary practice.

I’m not going to spoil the end of the film for you, but I will say it’s truly beautiful and profound. You just gotta see it.

The Jeremy Frey exhibit is headed to the Chicago Institute of Art in October 2024. So maybe it will some day turn up in a museum near you.

What does this have to do with being trans? With parenting a trans teen?

ABSOLUTELY NOTHING!

We are not only and always defined by this single facet of my child’s identity.

It’s a tender thing to admit, one’s ambitions to be an artist. JJ confided while we walked through this exhibit that they hoped to one day have their work shown in a museum. It would be easy enough to say “that’s nice, honey, sure.”

I said it would take a lot of work.

The best things come out of hard work.

They are the things worth working for. Like art. Like being yourself.