has made them so valued in the wabanaki indian basket making tradition for centuries and for frey today. jeremy is a perfect basket tree. see how straight it is, no knots , no branches. i will make a basket of it someday. jeffrey: these days the fruits of frey's work can be found in very different settings, art museums. in a first major survey titled “woven” at the portland museum of art, as well as in the llections of leading institutions including new york's metropolitan museum. baskets of different sizes, shapes, patterns, colors, made over the last 20 years featuring , innovations and refinements frey introduced such as fine weaves and double-walled baskets one within another. ,jeremy: if you duck way down, there is color under their you can never see. i did that just for me. jeffrey: all of it building on centuries of knowledge and craft. jeremy: weaving is so simple, it is up, down, over and under. a simple binary process. how do you make that more? jeffrey: the making of baskets, weaving, has been going on for a long, long time all over the world. you like being part of that history? jer

so much of what jeremy frey is doing is achieving -- attuning people to the extraordinary vision and genius behind these works. that absolutely deserves to be considered within a quote-unquote fine art context. but not abandoning the incredible craft roots and processes that bring it to life. >> but even as basketry begins to reach new and growing museum audiences, it faces an existential threat the emerald ash borer, an invasive beetle decimating the ash trees. >> you can tell the same story with another material but it won't be ethis same story. you can make the image look similar but it doesn't have the history, the cultural significance. the material isn't necessarily going to behave the same way. >> for now, frey is harvesting more trees than he needs an storing them against the grim future. while also enjoying the attention he's getting in what he admits is a very unexpected, even surreal, present. including the packed opening for this exhibition. dism it was intense. overwhelming. still doesn't really feel like it happened. like i'm still -- i don't know. at the end of the day