[music] Welcome to the Modern Art Notes Podcast. I'm Tyler Green. This week, Jeremy Frey. The Portland Museum of Art, the one up in Maine, is presenting Jeremy Frey Woven, a 20-year survey of Frey's basketry and printmaking. The exhibition features more than 50 baskets made from natural materials such as black ash and sweetgrass, as well as prints and even one video. The exhibition is on view through September 15th, when it will travel to the Art Institute of Chicago. It was curated by Remy Myse and Jamie D. Simone. The excellent catalog and its beautifully designed was published by Rosolie Electa in association with the PMA. Amazon and Bookshop offer it for about $35 to $46. In 2011, Frey became the first basket maker to win Best of Show at the Santa Fe Indian Market, a feat he repeated in 2014. His work has been included in exhibitions at institutions such as the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington and the Decord of a Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts. Frey, a seventh generation Passamaquoddy basket maker, makes his baskets from ash trees, which are threatened by an invasive species called the Emerald Ashborer. The exhibition discusses this threat to Wabanaki cultural traditions in Northeastern forests. The show does a lot of really interesting things all at once. On the second segment, Eastman Johnson and Maine at the Colby Museum of Art. If you enjoy the show, please give us a five-star rating and a review wherever you download it, and please tell a friend. Thanks very much. Jeremy Frey, after the break. [MUSIC PLAYING] Support comes from Getty, presenting the world premiere production of Memnon, a one-of-a-kind theatrical event under the stars. The play tells the tale of a powerful Ethiopian king who journeys to the city of Troy to engage in battle during the Trojan's darkest hour. This epic story from the ancient Greek legend of the fall of Troy has been overlooked for over a millennium until now. Memnon comes to life with bold, vivid language, and gripping dramatic conflict. Co-produced with the Classical Theater of Harlem, a theater company that tells stories through the lens of the African diaspora, directed by Carl Cofield, written by Will Power, and choreographed by Tiffany Rae Fisher. Thursdays through Saturdays this September at the Getty Villa Museum in Los Angeles. Book your tickets now at Getty.edu. For more than three decades, Arthur Jafa has criss-crossed the worlds of art, film, and music, taking viewers on a powerful journey through black expression. With a selection of works you won't want to miss, Jafa's newest survey at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago underscores his unique approach to art making, where the lines between popular and high-culture blur and the personal collides with the political. Plan your visit at mcachicago.org. The Menil Collection in Houston, Texas, presents Janet Sobel all over through August 11, 2024. Janet Sobel burst onto the New York art scene in the mid-1940s with a novel approach to modern abstraction, dripping and pouring skeins of paint onto horizontal boards or canvases, and filling these supports from corner to corner. She was an innovator of all over painting. The Menil's exhibition focuses on Sobel's abstract practice, bringing together some 30 artworks from museums, private collections, and the artists' family. Find details at menil.org. The Menil Collection is always free. (gentle music) And we're back. Jeremy Frey, welcome to the Modern Art Notes podcast. - Thank you. - And good to be here. - Within the survey in Portland, there is a video work commissioned by the museum titled "Ash." And it's a work that follows you making one of your works from beginning without giving away the ending, to the end, from the harvesting of an ash tree until, you know, really the end. Why did you want to make and include that video? - So that video actually is how I got the show at the PMA. I was talking with Jamie D. Simone, like three years ago. I was out in Santa Fe. I was talking about how my baskets started as craft, and I've always wanted to be seen as a contemporary artist. And I said, how all these ideas and different ways that I want to expand like my creativity into this other genre. And I pitched this idea of this video, and I described pretty much exactly what you see. It didn't change a lot. I didn't want music, I didn't want a voiceover. I just wanted the sound of the weaving, the sound of the ash being pounded, the sound of the chainsaw, just the sounds of making. And we have that. But I said, why don't you take that back to the museum? 'Cause I'm just a weaver, you know? This is the way I've always seen myself. And I said, why don't you bring that back to the museum and ask your colleagues what they think about this concept as a piece of art. And so a few weeks later she gets back to me and she says, you know, I talk to people, they love the idea. They think it's a great concept. We'd like to offer you a solo show at the museum. And so that was the beginning of this journey. And so I accepted it right away. I honestly, I knew someday I would have a show. I just, I never, my works take so long to make. I always thought it would be later and later finally arrived. Yeah, so I started working on the video. It took a long time to make a lot of edits, a lot of reimagining. But it turned out, I really liked the end result of what we did. Speaking of a process, you make baskets with an extraordinary range of shapes ranging from the traditional, such as urchin baskets, which are have a low round shape that recall a sea urchin to the far less traditional. That includes a number of things of your own innovation that we'll talk about here as we go along. As you're preparing to make a new work, as you've broken down a tree and you have strips of ash to use, how do you plan out or think about what a basket is going to be? Do you draw, do you make notes? Do you make models in some way? Oh, it varies wildly. I don't do as many commissions as I used to. I'm now that I work with the gallery. I have a much more, it's more wild. I get to do whatever I wanna do. Originally, when I was working my way through life, really, every piece was based on history. So if someone was gonna buy an expensive basket, they wanted to have an idea of what they were getting. So they say, well, let's make it like this one you made, but you do your magic on it this way and I like this color and yada yada. So I'd have a roadmap. And then commissions from museums, I'd be like, okay, well, I'll draw you five or six different versions of baskets that I think would be great in there. And then I'll give you images that refer to my designs and I'd let them pick that way. Well, now I can, if I'm making a new piece, it could be whatever I want it to be. And I will still draw images 'cause I wanna see the form and the flow. And sometimes I'll draw them to the point where they're blueprints. So I have exact angles and things like that. But it depends on the type of form I'm using and the type of form I'm making. I like the bases to be smaller than the tops. Most of my pieces, the covers are larger than the actual point of contact on the floor or wherever they're sitting. It's just a balanced thing. I feel like if they're heavier on the bottom, they're just not as elegant. And that's just my own personal preference. But then I think about material choice, whether I'm doing a braided material or flat weaving, fine weaving, some sort of overweave, a double wall or the multi-top stuff. I mean, it's a process. Have you ever exhibited those drawings? No, but I have them. They're really, they're on printer paper. They're nothing to smile at. And a lot of them have scribbles and coffee stains and they've been crumbled up a bit. Someday, yeah, someday I will exhibit them because they're a piece of this whole story. But some of them are just the roughest, roughest sketches. And it's just, and sometimes I'll be weaving a piece and I'll have an idea. And so I'll just get something real quick and just throw it on the table and it'll sit underneath a pile of ash and some tools for months. And then I'll pull it up and be like, oh yeah, that was, that came to me when I was weaving this other piece. So basically all of my pieces are inspired by previous work. All of them. Whether it's the one that goes into the wall, that's the idea of that is based on a massive piece I did years ago where when I pulled it off the form and looked into it, it just had this cosmos of just looking at the weave from an angle, allowed the weave to just play tricks on your eyes like crazy. So I said, well, how can I make a piece that's designed to just do that specifically? And so, you know, that came from that. And well, every weave I do comes from some idea I had when I was weaving another basket. So it's really a long process of, I mean, some of the designs have taken me 25 years to get there just because every piece builds on the next. - One of the distinguishing or at least immediately noticeable parts of your work of individual works are overweaves which create the curls or the points, the kind of triangular points on the outside of your baskets. They kind of extend toward the viewer or sometimes they extend almost straight up toward the top of the basket. How did those come into the work? Are they a traditional technique or is that something that you have developed and significantly amped up? - So originally, the first basket I ever made had those points on them. It was natural on natural and it was just a natural basket. There was no color. And it wasn't presented the way I present them. It was a different weave, but it was still curled that way. And my mother had learned from her teacher how to make those points. And her teacher's name was Sylvia Gabriel and she had brought them back from historical works. And so I liked them and what I've found as I've gone through the years is that the way that the curl lays versus the way that the basket lays, when you use color with those, they have a tendency to show certain parts and cover other parts. So you can use the overweave with the shape of the basket to either block or expose color. And so you get this iridescence in the work if you do it right. And obviously color matters dramatically with those, but the reason you see so much in my work is because I'm able to make these hypnotic sort of iridescent sculptures out of wood that I don't know another, I don't know that I'll ever get rid of that weave. I mean, it almost seems like, to me sometimes I feel like I've overused it, but it just tells the story I wanna tell. I mean, I make sure that not all of my pieces are point baskets because I have a lot of different techniques and a lot of different ways of presenting the work, but just the things that that does with color, I can't replace it. - We'll come back to color in a minute, but the other thing it does is impacts the way light touches the work. - That reflects right back to color. - Yeah, it does. But it also, I mean, the other thing that I found myself thinking a lot about when I saw the show in Portland was shadow on the work. How not only does the surface, whether dyed or not, of your basket's shimmer almost glow from within, but those points throw specific shadows onto the body of the work, if you will. Do you think about how light and shadow act on the surface of the work? - Oh, yeah, you have to. And again, it's mostly the point weave, but it's the weave that I've developed that sort of gives you the diagonal lines as you weave and you see it a lot. It causes your eye to search for patterns that aren't there. And the shadow does a lot with that. And also the way that the points line up from point to point. Yeah, I mean, it's just part of the process. And a lot of it, honestly, when I developed it was subconscious, it was just, like I just enjoyed seeing it, you know? - I found that when I was looking at the baskets, I was, and I noticed other people in the gallery were doing this too, I was kind of bouncing up and down, you know, kneeling or squatting and then standing back up, watching how light and color on the baskets acted. Color, the color you use is really striking. It's really gripping. I'm obviously not the only one struck by that because the designer of the catalog for your show Kimberly Varela took the green color you used in a 2022 work called a defensive and used it as a design highlight throughout the catalog and around it. So the, you know, ends of the paper, you know, have this kind of green color that wrap around the whole catalog. I mean, it's more than once since having it on my desk, I thought, oh, I better make sure my hands are clean before I touch this, you know, that kind of precious objectness. So I know you're using dies in these baskets. You've talked about that before, but beyond, you know, commercially available colors, how are you sourcing or developing a palette that you want to use on the wood? - So, originally when I first started weaving, I didn't use dies. I only used things that I could harvest myself. So I've used a birch bark, which is a nice brown, and you get many shades of brown in the birch bark. - And there will be individual baskets in which you use multiple natural browns within the work. - Yeah, natural materials. So I used cedar bark, which also patina is brown, and there's different ways of making that darker or lighter. Spruce roots, same thing. You can get spruce roots in several different shades of brown. The sweet grass starts off green, but it ends up brown. And then the wood itself comes in different shades of white, in different shades of brown. And sometimes I've really been a stickler. Especially before I was using dies, I would have two toned wooden woven baskets that were just hardwood and sapwood. - Yeah, I mean, I think that's... - And are the dies that are the really bright colors, the greens, the blues, are those locally sourced? - No, those are synthetic dies. - Those are synthetic dies. All right, that's what I thought. - Well, so here's the thing. Developing in art form from something as basic as weaving, I mean, it's literally over-under. That's what it is, it's one's and zero, this is binary. I mean, how can you... If someone were to tell me that I would be creating what I'm creating today, the day I learned weaving, I would have said that's impossible because it just doesn't seem to innovate the process. It took 25 years. It wasn't something I did in a year, two years, three years. And I'm still figuring out new ways of presenting the work, still with that same basic code, you know what I mean? And so putting that kind of energy into developing a weave, I just didn't have the energy or time to understand natural dying and natural selection of dies and harvesting that 'cause I harvest all my other materials. It's like, it'd be like learning a second art form completely. Especially the way I approach my work. I don't do anything halfway, so I can't imagine. If I start obsessing about dying, I never make a basket again, just wouldn't. - Well, a lot of the fun within the work, and I think there are 21 years worth of work in the show, is seeing what you point out as a binary process, just be enormously complicated and including in multiple media. So some of the innovations you bring into the work that just shout out of the show, I wanna derays. One of them is that you, often, not always, but often make double walled baskets wherein the outside of the basket is completely different from the inside of the basket. Different weave, different colors, different texture. What prompted you to start making baskets with two completely different walls? - Originally, when I did that, I was just trying to develop something new. And what I did was there was no die, there was no color. It was strictly, I want to do a fine view on the inside and a point basket on the outside and put a cover on it and just not tell anybody about it at all. So it would look like a point basket on the outside and that would be the end of it, right? And then, and I did it for myself, just to see if it could be done. Again, I'm always trying to, like I say, it's such a simple, I mean, I'm not saying that basketry simple, but the premise of it, the idea of weaving is very simple. And there's just so many ways that you can tweak and complicate that. And I've always thought about my stuff as it has to be aesthetically pleasing. You can overwork the material, but don't do it in a way that doesn't add an aesthetic. 'Cause you can make a really ugly basket by overworking it. And that's something that I won't do. And if I do, I mean, I've done a few, just because if you experiment constantly, some of your experiments will not work. - I write bad paragraphs all the time. - Oh, I'm telling you. - So I took the first basket I ever made and I showed it to a master elder weaver at one of my shows, a native weaver. And I said, "I hope I should check this basket." And it was really, it was well made without, you know, it was balanced, it was even, it was nice ash, it was nice and white. She said, "Well, I really like that ghost." And I said, "Yeah, look at the inside." She's like, "Oh, it's nice." And I said, "Did you notice anything?" She said, "It's the beautiful basket." I said, "And she's a master." I said, "Look at it again." And she didn't see it. So I said, "Look at the inside." And look at the outside. So literally, I had to, this is a master, she's wove for baskets her whole life. And it was so subtle. And when she finally saw it, you just see her eyes, she was like, she just, she didn't, she couldn't, the thing was, it was, she couldn't compute it. It didn't, 'cause I don't tell people that they're double wolves. They have to figure that out for themselves. And I remember I said, "I'm on to something. I'm doing this again." And then eventually, I started doing color on the inside and white on the outside or white on the outside. You know, I do these two, like, or opposite colors. Like maybe it would be colors that wouldn't work together, but since they oppose one another, it doesn't matter because you don't ever see them at the same time. And I thought that was a great way of kind of doing something you're not supposed to do with color and making it work completely, you know? The way they work on a viewer, at least for me, is even by, like, the third or fourth one in the show when I knew they might be coming, it would make me look at the outside, look at the inside, and then when I saw that the inside was different, I would question whether or not I'd really seen what I thought I saw on the outside. It's like a kind of painterly technique that where the painter, through compositional strength, can, like, move your eye around a canvas. And that technique works the same way on a three-dimensional object, where there's-- I have the best kind of uncertainty in the head that you keep going back and forth from one tether. Well, it's great having the benefit of having those multiple surfaces as well, because a painter doesn't get that. And so I can, like, when you take your eyes off the outside to see the inside, you no longer see the outside. And so it's this, you get these breaks between the viewings, whereas you can sort of, on a painting, you can scan back and forth. Yeah, and I always-- the multiple weaving is actually something I'm still exploring. And there'll be new things coming out with that. And new ways of presenting new patterning based on these dual wall ideas. And I'm actually really excited. I'm always excited to try new ideas when they get pop into my head. What is a bias top? So a bias top was-- my work is so geometrically stable that I-- I mean, weaving is-- you have these uprights and you have the horizontal weavings. And I mean, they look great. But I wanted to make something that sort of had more flow to it, more of a slope, and more of like one side would end up being higher than the other. So they'd kind of flow up into these hills, or these waves, or these crests of a weave. And so I came up with like what I call a bias top. And it just made-- basically, you know, you weave flat across the basket. And if you're good, you can keep that perfectly flat. Well, I was going to say, all right, well, if you're really good-- and not that I'm saying that, but if you're really, really good, instead of making it stay flat, you can make it get crazy warped, but still be structurally as close to perfection as you can get in a weave. And so that's something that I've been kind of developing as these ways of having like multiple planes. Like there'll be multiple tops. One-- it looks like nesting baskets. One comes out of the other. It really goes out of the other. And then you can play with the way that those-- the hoops, the edges of the tops, play with each other, light-wise, shadow-wise, how high it comes out of each one. And the bias top, it's elegant the way it works. I like it, you have to see it. I mean, it's hard to describe. Yeah, we'll have images on manpodcast.com. It's kind of a combination of nesting dolls and topography. There's almost a landscape reference within the-- That architecture as well. It's like one of the pieces is called cathedral. And it is one of the bias top pieces. And it reminds me of sort of a church or a holy place. And mainly because it's just black and white and has that purity to it. But later on, as in my career, I started naming the works. And it's interesting. You can name them based on an idea that you had weaving or based on the feeling they give you when they're done or based on material or color. I mean, so it's not like painting an image of a scene or a people and being able to name that. These are sculptures and they're fairly abstract. And so when I do name them, the names come to me quite clearly. But I wouldn't say I pick a name and design a piece around a name. It's more the piece tells me what it's going to be called. Don land has the yellows, oranges, and purples of sunrise. That's exactly it. And that was named after it was made. It wasn't designed to be the don until I saw it finished. What determines the scale of a given work? There's a real range of size within the baskets you've made over the last 20 odd years. Some can be held in the palm of a person's hand. Others definitely require two hands and some work to safely lift. What determines scale? So scale is determined by some of the largest pieces I've ever made were commissions. And they were asked for. And I've always led people commissioning my work towards that end because that was a part of weaving I hadn't explored because some people, as you scale up, you'll use bigger pieces. Well, if I use bigger pieces, it changes the energy of the work. So instead of using bigger pieces, I use more pieces. So there is a limit to size, but I haven't found the limit. And so the larger pieces in the show are deliberately exploration pieces. And they're designed to see what I'm capable of and what the works capable of and what the design is capable of. Now, the problem with that is some of these huge pieces take six months to make. So if you're experimenting on something that takes six months to make, it's a major gamble. It really is. I usually won't go forward with it until I've already tried every part of the technique on other pieces. So that's the large scale stuff. The small scale stuff, originally my small stuff was made so I could fill the table for shows. I'd make the more elaborate, medium-sized pieces. And I'd say, well, I'd like a few more pieces, so I'll make some small stuff. Then I started shrinking down the large pieces to the small size and sort of making miniature versions of them, which they have a great energy at that size anyway. But mainly I just like to have a variety of scale. It's as simple as just wanting to kind of do a little bit of everything. So the biggest ones are what, about three feet high now? Yeah, yeah, two feet wide. Two feet wide, yeah. And they're massive for a fancy basket. I've never seen fancy baskets that side of the ones I've made. I mean, not that they don't exist, I've just never seen them. I mean, as I looked at the large baskets, I just kind of assumed that the amount of more material it takes to make them is practically exponential because they have to be stronger than the smaller ones to stand up, to sustain the pressure that holds their shape, which brings me to ash. The material you use, brown ash, as it's called in Maine. Ash trees are threatened by the Emerald Ash Borer, which is an insect that entered the United States, I think from Asia in 2002. So actually, not that long ago. Yeah, it's, it's, I mean, it doesn't seem like it, but I've been watching it since then. It seemed to go lifetime as well. I think it's in 16 of Maine's 18 counties. Yeah. So what are some of the adaptations you have made to address or prepare for the threat that the Ash Borer poses? So I, well, I incorporated the Cedarbark early on, that was a deliberate response. The quill work and some of the birch work is also a response to it. I've also, I harvest way more material than I use. So I have a stockpile of store material. It's inevitable that they will not be harvestable trees at some point in the future. And so, I mean, as you said, we have what, 20, 21 years of history in the show. I've been doing it for about 24, 25 years. So I, you know, that's been a lifetime dedication. So for me to dedicate my life to something and then have the main material disappear, it's, it's unacceptable, but we do what we can do. So, so one of my main focuses is on harvesting and processing as much material as I possibly can, so that I have a future in this. But that being said, at the show, we have prints, we have video, you know, I'm not like, I've focused on baskets for 20, some years. I've done art my whole life. This isn't, it's not a coincidence that my baskets look the way they do. It's, it's because I enjoy creating and I enjoy beauty and I enjoy telling a story. And, and I think that over the next five, 10, 15 years, I'm going to tell a lot more of that story without ash. Even though I'll still have ash, I'd always, I always hope to create art and share with the world. And I hope it can be a baskets as long as it can be, but, but it, you know, I'm totally open to and I'm exploring the ideas of telling beautiful stories with other media. - We've mentioned a couple times that the baskets are held together by, by nothing but the weave, by pressure. So, given what's happening to the material you use due to an insect infestation, are you interested in or at all motivated by the metaphorical possibilities therein that the works are held together by pressure and that material itself is under pressure? 'Cause we're coming to the prints, which also involve pressure. - No, this is true. And, you know, I never really thought about that. It's, it's, it's sort of ironic. I do love the way that baskets come together and each piece holds the other piece. So they, this, this, this relationship of, of cooperation. Every single piece on that basket, you take one away and you no longer have cooperation. So I, it kind of astonishes me to look, to look at a finished piece and see how solid it is and how everything just works so well together to think that, you know, there is, there is nothing gluing it, there's nothing tying it. It's just some, it's kind of a, it's a reflection I've had after the fact. And as more of a mature artist just thinking about those things, I just kind of took them for granted as I made pieces, but it's astonishing what you can do and how it can look. - We've both mentioned prints a couple times. I think last year, 2023, you started making prints for the first time. You make them in an extremely unusual way that sure left me sticking my nose right up to the plexi to bask in the detail on the surface of, of the paper. We'll talk about what you, what we see in the print, but first, how do you make a print? - So the, the print process I'm using would normally have copper plates that are etched and you'd ink the plates and, and you run it through this press. Well, as a weaver, I use weaving. So I, the plates are actually flat woven baskets and they're inked and ran through the press. And what that does is it shows every detail of the grain, it embosses the paper, which adds this great light texture. And it leaves this complete carbon copy if you, you know, of the piece that went there. And, and when they first come out of the press is the very first time that, that, that I was going through the process. It looked like the basket was sitting on the paper, just sitting there. - It still does. - Yeah, well, well, so, okay. So if you don't, but if you, if you don't care about prints and you don't really, you can overlook the prints, they're subtle. - They're pretty cool. - If you look at them, they'll pull, they'll pull you in. Well, I mean, it's both ways. I just think of like, there's so many audiences viewing the show, like the video, for example, the end of the video is shocking. And some people are going to completely understand what I was going for. Some people are going to get mad, and some people aren't going to understand it at all. I'll just be like, I don't know why I just watched that. And we're not going to do the spoiler on it. But what I'm saying is like prints are the same way. You can, you can, you can overlook those completely, just based on your, what your interests are and your education and your knowledge of it or whatever. But if you give them a second, they're, they're quite, I think they're quite the energetic object. And I think all the pieces in there have, have a bit of energy to them. - So most of what ends up in the prints is, is the result of pressure. I mean, there's ink. You mentioned there's ink. There's ink listed in this. - Yes. - But is it most of what we're seeing the result of pressure? - Oh, yeah. Well, no, yeah. I mean, cause, and if you go, there's a few embossments that didn't have ink. - Right, right. There's one on my screen right now, actually, yeah. - So those are, those are literally, we light them high and you just see the shadows. And so you know there was a basket there. It has a presence like this, like a history of the piece, but it's a ghost. You know what I mean? - And there's no explanation, you know, in the show, or, you know, in somebody's house of how you did it. We just see, you know, relief print and embossment with handwoven Wabanaki basket by the artist on a certain kind of paper. And if you want slightly more information, it's, it's, it's available. Yeah, cause the paper, actually the paper, there was a lot of special papers used in this project. Actually every single print, including the ones that aren't in the show, they're all monoprints, they're all a one off. Cause the weave moves or the ink changes or the paper changes, or like we do a Shinkolet technique where you press paper into paper to get two tones. And then you print over that. Yes, so they're all monoprints. They're all one of a kind pieces of art made, I don't know, I went crazy with the embossments. - The embossments are awesome. They're completely awesome. - So I have, I have a set of embossments here in the studio that I'm actually going to hand color without ink. I'm going to hand color them with different types of color, colored pencil or start. But I just, I knew that once I inked the wood, we couldn't emboss. So I did a lot more embossments than I had intended to because it can go backwards. And so I think hand coloring them will add a whole new dimension to that, to that series of prints. And again, it allows me to, to do something new, to experiment, to play with color in a different way, to play with texture in a different way, because if you're using color pencil or watercolor or paint, you can change textures. And I'll basically be working within those embossments, the valleys of the paper, to kind of embellish what they're already showing. - Yeah, they're pretty cool. We'll have an example or two on manpodcast.com, but you know, get to Portland or Chicago or. - Greenwich. - Greenwich, thank you. He says panicked to see the show. I wanted to wrap up by talking about the rings on the tops of the lids of your baskets, which by the way, I have read that you hate making. (laughing) - I hate making them. They're the last thing you make, and they're sort of the most elaborate thing. And it cramps your hands and it's a few hours of just this constant. So I don't hate making them, but it's like when you're almost at the finish line and you're wiped out and you're just like, "Ah, come on, I love them." It's just that it's fairly frustrating to wrap a basket up that way. - I found that there were the last thing I looked at on on or at or whatever the word is, every basket. - In a good way or a bad one? - Oh yeah, in a good way. They allowed me, so when you exhibit the baskets, you very often not always exhibit them with the lids on. And so being, I found that my eyes were finishing on those rings because that allowed my brain to think about what might be inside. - Right. - The, you know, whether there was a hidden, you know, double wall, whether the colors were different, the light was different on the inside. It just was a portal to what I didn't know and still don't know it. - And again, not to cut you off here, but that's exactly what Sir Isabella is about, giving you a glimpse to the insides and making it be kind of more than you expected the insides to be. - That's the piece that is well-mounted. - Yes. - So maybe-- - So it's quite literally the inside of a basket, but it's a sculpture, it's not a basket. - And it's mounted in a wall, and it looks like it just goes on forever. So the rings are an example of artists coming together in a geographically neutral place, not your studio, not someone else's studio. In this case, it was the 2006 Smithsonian Folklife Festival learning from each other. So how did rings, which is I understand it, are not a traditional Wabanaki thing, come into your work through someone else? - So I did rings, but originally we did, we did these little ribbon curls, decorative ribbon curls on the top of fancy baskets, and I just, I did them for a while, but they just seemed like something that we own a wedding cake, or I don't know. So I started doing rings 'cause you could pull 'em off. And then I went to the Smithsonian Folk Art Festival, and I met some, but it was a weaving conference. Basically, there's all weavers from all over the country, and some of those weavers were from Hawaii, and I made good friends with them. They invited me to a weaving conference in Hawaii, I ended up going, and while I was there, they were weaving these bracelets out of a local material called Lohala. And I was looking at 'em, I said, you know, that looks just like my rings, but it has this crazy weave on it. And I said, you know, and here's the thing, developing my techniques and patterns throughout my entire career, I've deliberately stayed away from looking at other weavers' work, because I wanted to be unique, I wanted to feel like I had done this myself, and then I wasn't taking ideas, and that people, I wanted to think, I wanted to do things people had never seen. And so, aside from being inspired by maybe some of my family of color-wise and stuff, everything that I've ever done has come from within, except the weaves on the rings. And it was just such an epiphany for me, it was just like, that was it, that was the one thing that my work was missing was a way to just bring that weave all the way right to the sky, right to your top piece, what's it called, the finial of the basket, if you may. It's, it completes it in a way that I wouldn't have done without that trip, and I always, always mention that, because I don't take people's work, I never have. - It introduces a second temptation, the first temptation in the work is wondering what it feels like, it's that the work is so tactile, and then the second temptation is wondering what it looks like inside, so. - And you can't do either of those at the show. Spoiler alert, you can't, everything's under glass. And all the covers are on, well for the most part. - There's one piece, there's one basket that's out. - That's exposed, it's exposed without the cover on, but you can't look in it anyway, it's too far away. - Yeah, you've got to be really tall and have like a go-go gadget neck. - Yeah, bring a drone in there to get away with that, I don't know. - Love it, Jeremy Frey, thanks very much. - Certainly, thanks for having me, it's been great. (gentle music) - The Nashor Sculpture Center is proud to present Sarah Z, an exhibition that invites viewers into a captivating collection of new site-specific works spanning three gallery spaces. With installations that will integrate painting, sculpture, images, sound, and video with the surrounding architecture, Sarah Z will create intimate systems that reference the rapidly changing world. The exhibition will blur the boundaries between making and showing, process and product, digital and material, ultimately to question how objects acquire their meaning. Sarah Z is on view at the Nashor from February 3rd through August 18th. Plan your visit at nashorsculpturescenter.org. Located in the heart of downtown Berkeley at the edge of the University of California campus, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive is one of the nation's leading university art museums, a locally rooted, globally relevant institution that connects audiences with the most exciting artists and filmmakers of our time. Uniquely dedicated to both art and film, BAMFA hosts more than a dozen art exhibitions, hundreds of film screenings, and countless public programs each year, with a growing emphasis on contemporary work by Black, Asian, and Latinx voices. To see what's on view and plan a visit, go to BAMFA.org. Welcome back. Next up, Sarah Humpherville joins me to discuss Eastman, Johnson, and Maine at the Colby Museum of Art at Colby College. The show celebrates the bicentennial of Johnson's birth with a presentation of works Johnson made about Maine, his home state. It is accompanied by a gallery of works made by Johnson's peers. Johnson and Maine is on view through December 8th. I saw it a few weeks ago, it is a heck of a lot of fun. Sarah Humpherville, welcome to the Modern Art Notes Podcast. Thanks so much for having me, glad to be here. Eastman Johnson was born and raised first in Western Maine on the edge of the White Mountains and in Augusta, kind of in the middle. He bounced around Boston and Washington. He studied in Dusseldorf and eventually, he of course lives in New York. But he returned to New England and especially to Maine in his work like darn near throughout. So why was Maine a draw for him? I mean, I think Maine is foundational for Johnson. It's where he's experiencing just everyday existence as he's growing up. He has foundational memories from being in the state. And I think in the exhibition that comes through, I think most particularly in the maple sugar paintings, which are so specific to here. And so as he's searching for subject matter, thinking about what he's interested in, what also would be appealing, he has this place to draw on that is so typical of Yankee life. And of course, what Johnson is doing in many of his paintings is drawing on this idea of types and of American types. Why are Mayners good American types? Why are Mayners good American types? I mean, I think-- Beyond the thing that wherever you grew up, you think of as being the American type. Right. Well, I think that there is this kind of persistent idea that rural life is an American type. We see that over and over again across time, we still see it. And so to be returning to a place where he had this connection to the rural and to rural types is I think part of what is happening there. And it certainly I think felt very different than the urban existence that he was used to in New York so that he could have something that was both familiar in Maine as subject matter, but also quite different. He's playing to patrons also. And lots of his clientele weren't necessarily people who were native New Yorkers. And so sometimes in what they were collecting, I think we're seeking something that drew on their memories. And there's certainly a very nostalgic quality to Johnson's work, intentionally so. In a related story, there still aren't a lot of Johnson's in California, for example. Before we talk about the subjects that Johnson represents in his paintings, and you mentioned a major one a moment ago, let's talk a little bit about the Maine of the 1860s and '70s, the period that is represented in your show. So what was Maine like economically? What was keeping Maine going in those years? What was it like, democratically, who lived there? I guess that's a way of asking. Was Maine as white and rural as Johnson paints it? I mean, Maine is still a very rural state and is certainly an economic motivator for the economy here. The timber industry is, of course, a major factor. And we see Johnson in a few instances in his main pictures showing people who are involved in logging. But it's still very white. And it was quite white during Johnson's time, but it was certainly not exclusively white. So there is, you know, we have a Wabanaki population here that persists here that was there when Johnson was working, that he virtually ignores in his paintings, even though in earlier instances when recently returned to your piece spent time in Wisconsin depicting indigenous subjects. And he also, exactly. He also, to the best of my knowledge, never depicts a black American person in Maine. And they were here too. I think some of, you know, some of what happens in the period that's covered by the show that really pertains to his main subjects in the 1860s and 1870s is that after the Civil War, you know, we really start to see it in Johnson's art probably around 1868 while he had engaged with black subjects before he really stopped doing so. Which wasn't specific to him and was, I think, keeping in trends in American painting in general, again, going back to this idea that artists are painting sometimes with patrons in mind. And I think after the war, people just didn't want to think about slavery, didn't want to think about the conflict, didn't want to think about, you know, a class system based on race anymore. - In a semi-related story, there are some subjects that held Johnson's interest over an extended period. One of them is sugaring, which in Maine means maple sugaring. Why was the making of maple sugar a subject that attracts and holds Johnson's attention? Particularly, I think, in relation to what we were just talking about. - Yeah, absolutely. So maple sugaring is an annual write in Maine. Even to this day, it is something that is an activity that people are partaking in sort of at the end of the winter. It's a technology that is built on indigenous traditions. And was adopted by, you know, the local Yankees. And by the time that Johnson is working is very much something that is sort of associated with Yankee identity. And for Johnson, these are, again, these really foundational memories for him. He, you know, he would have grown up seeing this. This is also a moment of celebration for the communities that participate in this ritual. It, you know, takes quite a bit of time to tap out the trees, to boil down the sap. It can be, you know, quite arduous work, but it's also a real big party once it's finally made. And we see that in Johnson's paintings, these different gatherings in the woods. We see him depicting people dancing and so forth, even as we see others sort of toiling at the kettle. And so when he's thinking about, I think, you know, he finds in certain paintings these, you know, real quiet moments of everyday existence, but he also does find these sort of special occasions in the maple sugar painting. And so he's really celebrating where he's from. I think what he ended up finding, though, in those works, too, was a way to assert his position as being in favor of the Union during the Civil War. In large part through Brian Allen's research, we've, you know, understood that Johnson's paintings of maple sugar are a way of asserting that product as the sort of abolitionist sugar, that this is a sweetener that is made without enslaved labor. So when Johnson's producing most of the works in this series from 1861 to 1865, that is something that would very much have been understood by people who were looking at them. But I think that what he also encounters with them, and this kind of goes to the idea of the local, is he maybe had almost too much of a local subject matter in the maple sugar paintings. He never could find a patron who totally understood or hit on this subject. He always had the intention to make, you know, almost like a history painting scaled work of this and was never able to do so, though there's a great, large, but completely unfinished work in RISD's collection. And it's in part because he probably never found somebody to support it. And so of all the paintings in this series, which are about 25 of them, there's likely only one totally finished composition, which is in the show and in the National Gallery. And the others are, you know, at various stages of finished or unfinished oil sketches. - There is a party picture in your collection. It's a pretty large picture, 30 by 40. And it's a pretty complicated composition. How does it represent the party? I guess literally the party in the maple sugar camp, which is the title of the painting is known. - Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, I think, yeah, this painting is great because it gives us insight into all of the different kinds of activity that might have been happening at one of these parties. And that one of the things that shows is that it's a party for some people and that other people are working really hard. And I think in this painting, but really throughout Johnson's works in the 1860s and 1870s, we often see this real juxtaposition of labor and leisure at the same time. So in the painting, in the foreground, we have this sort of pyramid type structure of figures who are engaged in, you know, the real life of the party. We see, we see figures dancing. We also see others who seem to be engaged in pretty deep conversation. But then behind them, we see the shed and we see the kettle and we see people hard at work stirring and boiling over this sugar. So I think in the work that's in the Colby collection, which really was the impetus for us doing the show, we see this kind of grand narrative that then Johnson breaks down in other works into its component parts and pieces like measurement and contemplation at the camp, which is from the MFA Boston's collection, also in the exhibition. We see, you know, two people kind of having some sort of business exchange. We see them, you know, probably measuring out, you know, how much maple sugar is in something. We see in another work, children, adolescent age children, hauling barrels in from the woods. So collectively, they kind of build up this big picture of what goes into how the party and the Colby painting transpires. - My favorite, weird, not weird. I'm not sure. The detail in the painting is that there's a fiddler at the very top of the pyramid in the Colby painting and I never thought of violins or the fiddle as being a main thing. So what do I know? - I love that character. I mean, he really, he serves as like the maestro of the party and you know, he's kind of at the top of this peak and making everyone around him dance and experience the merriment and sort of like the movement of the party just spells from him and you sort of get that in the way that Johnson moves his paint around but also in how these sort of lines of bodies come out of this structure that he's in. - It's a terrific painting. Obviously ambitious. Johnson's doing the red, yellow and blue primaries. He's doing these kind of overlapping triangles. There is like weather happening in the background or at least snow blowing around. It's pretty fab. - I think that one of the things to that detail of the snowballing around that really comes out and seeing these works in person is just the sense of atmosphere that Johnson captures in his works and the way that he also really understands snow feels like somebody who really spent some time in Maine with our winters and other works who can see him figuring out how to layer his paint in such a way that it looks like snow is pushed up against a tree and then just sort of gradually melts into mud and maple sugar is happening towards the end of winter which here comes right before mud season. So I think he's kind of hinting at what is ahead too. - Only one of the outdoor paintings in your show features a blue sky. Otherwise everything's kind of gray and snow belowy and whatnot. The one that features a blue sky is a 6165 painting called The Truence at the National Gallery through the Corcoran and my guess as to why the sky is blue is that because I think Mount Washington is in the background of the painting and if snow is blowing around, you would miss that Civil War reference to Washington being as iconic in the north as he is the south, something that was pretty common in Northern US painting in the 1850s and during the war. So as we've kind of talked about a few times, among the reasons for Johnson's work being of interest to us today other than their just like really delightful pictures is that he was the rare, rare, rare US painter of the period who addressed US politics and US ideologies with direct subject matter with who and what he represents in his pictures rather than through metaphor, especially Emersonian metaphor. So what issues are topics in the 1860s and 70s United States do we see Johnson addressing in your show and with Maine as his stage set or backdrop? - Well, I think stage set is the perfect way to describe it. I think so many of Johnson's paintings really appear as if they are set on a stage that the figures are performing in a way and I think that is most acute in his barn interior pictures and it's one of those works where we actually I think see his politics and his exploration of the issues of the day on display. So there's a work called barn interior corn husking time from 1860 which is in the Everson Museum's collection that's in the exhibition and the subject matters described by the title. It features one character really at the center, fully in the light hauling a basket of corn to the left side we see a grandfather and a child also kind of working with the corn, the grandfather's clearly teaching the child something, this intergenerational relationship is also something we see across his work. To the right side though, in that juxtaposition of labor and leisure that we mentioned earlier, you see a couple of younger people who are very clearly more interested in flirting with each other than doing the work that they're meant to be doing. And they're all against a backdrop of hey, the background behind them is really shadowy. This is definitely a work where we see the influence of Dutch painting on Johnson. But against this really seemingly charming and lovely and innocuous scene, Johnson gives us a real clue into what is going on at the time and on the right side of the painting that he's painted the barn door which helps formally set the stage, create the stage, create its boundary, it shows you exactly where you are. But in it, he has painted this detail of scratched graffiti that says Lincoln and Hamlin and being made in the lead up to the election in which Lincoln is running for president and Hamlin is running as his vice presidential candidate. Hamlin was from Maine, so this painting had an extra connection to the show with our topic of Eastman Johnson and Maine. But with that detail, Johnson is showing himself to be engaged in paying attention to the current events of the time and really making his painting as a colleague of mine here at Colby said he makes it a kind of yard sign equivalent for 1860 to have this graffiti there. So Johnson's painting is very much of a very specific time in place through the inclusion of that detail. - I just want to emphasize that this is a painting from 1860 of a small farm worked by free white labor. Small farms by the 1850s and 1860s are become a staple of American painting, whether it's Emersonian landscape painting or here a domestic interior-ish painting by Johnson because of course that system of agriculture was in stark and overwhelming contrast to the large-scale glauge-driven agriculture that dominated in the south. Any painting in the US, made in the northern US in these years of a farm or a small farm is about that. And as you noted, I suspect Johnson makes that as clear as he can by referencing the Republican Party ticket. - Absolutely, and I think the fact to that these barn interiors, these farm scenes keep coming up is a sort of insistence of that idea too. - You mentioned Eastman Johnson and Dutch painting. One of the joys of the show is that it gives us a chance to see Johnson work within a certain tonal range, which you referenced earlier as being related to his just love of Dutch art. There's all of this rich, brown, earthy, Rembrandt-ish tonality throughout the show. Johnson loves painting with a single light source, just as the Dutch did. So you think of all those Dutch paintings with a window on the left-hand side and the light glancing across a map or a woman at a table or whatnot. And Johnson does his own version of that in many paintings that are based on single light sources. Why do you think not only did he come to love that painting in the first place, not exactly an American thing, but then held onto it? I mean, he kept on loving it. - Right, so after Johnson spends time in Dusseldorf at the Dusseldorf Academy, he goes to the Hague and is exposed to Dutch art constantly and becomes inspired by it. And I think in looking at it, he's able to then blend in his art, what he's technically learned in Germany at the Academy, this very formal training. And then seeing the Dutch paintings right after learning that is able to then think through this idea of genre painting, these paintings of everyday life and then combines what he sees with what he has in the background of his mind. And then is able to really learn from looking. And then I think we see him just really, I feel like we never talk about 19th century artists this way, but I think we really see him nerding out about being a painter, about the possibilities of paint and how that can really be explored when you're working in a limited tonal range. And so we see, as you suggested, all of these really varied and luscious Siemas and embers and hognies and different types of ochres in there. We also, though, really see him playing with the texture of the paint, particularly in paintings that feature, hey, it became a way for him to explore with how to put paint down on campus and really were bored and really get variation within the same. But I think one of the things that happens in his work too, and this is now going back to his engagement with the politics of his time and the Civil War, is that by having these quite monochromatic backgrounds, then when he does inject color, it's that much more impactful. So in the truants featuring that blue sky, it really, really hits you against everything else. Or we see over and over again these arrangements of red, white and blue in the compositions, which is very clear what that references into the Civil War. So a work like Shelling Corn, which is an interior domestic scene of a grandfather and a young child. Again, with corn is the center of activity, what they're doing. There's a basket of corn. The grandfather is taking the kernels off the cob. The little boy is playing with them, making them into a cannon. So again, a very clear reference to what is happening at the time in that work. The grandfather's wearing this billowy white shirt with these big sleeves. The grandson is in blue and red. And all of this just stands out against this dark brownish background. So it really brings forward that idea of with the union. And I think in linking, doing that kind of work in the formal qualities of the painting, by showing it with this family, with this multi-generational family too. He also really kind of helps set the stakes for what is happening in this conflict. And that starts with the foundations of how he's constructing his painting. It's part of how he gets his message across. So I think it's a mix of what are you trying to say and how do you like to say things? - There's a great example of Johnson's love of paint and painterliness. In a main painting that's not in the show, it's at the MFA Boston, it's called a winnowing grain. And it is just an absolute dance of light and paint and effects. Tiny little painting, kind of hard to see at the MFA, but it is a stunner, well, I have an image on manpodcast.com as we will for most or all of the pictures we've been talking about. As you mentioned a moment ago, you're showing the Johnson's with about a dozen and a half or so of pictures by his peers, which raises all kinds of interesting art historical connections. So we get to see, for example, some Dusseldorfians together. Like Johnson, Albert Bierstadt spent time in Dusseldorf, although Bierstadt was not at the academy, he didn't have the money for it. We surmised. Early contemporary critics of Bierstadt's complained that his pictures were too Dusseldorfian, a possibly nationalistic phrase referencing Bierstadt's birth, Bierstadt was born in Germany, but also maybe meaning some other things too. And so one of the things that really jumped out of this presentation to me is how much differently we see kind of a mid-career Bierstadt painting light than we see Johnson painting light. Bierstadt, perhaps because of that criticism, got away from that dark palette and those dark foregrounds where as Johnson got to kind of bask in them. Are there other places and ways in which you see Johnson and his peers' relationships that really clicked for you or worked for you, especially once you got him on walls? - Yeah, absolutely. So to speak to the larger context of having those other works on Vue, I felt like because the focus on Johnson was so tight within this show and that his world of the 19th century wouldn't really be known to viewers that it made sense to bring out works from the collection that could really open up that sense of him, that side of him for people. And one of the things that also just really came out in learning about Johnson and researching him was just how involved he was with the artistic community. I mean, he seems to have been very, very popular, involved in lots of clubs and certainly looking at what everyone else is making too. So that felt really important to include in what he was doing. And I think one of the kind of delightful surprises for me was this painting by George Henry Hall in our collection called Still Life with Graves, Peach, and pomegranates. Hall was one of Johnson's closest friends was the person who he went to Dusseldorf with and this painting, you know, is, you know, it's so, it's so Dutch, it's made, you know, really probably, I can't remember when Hall returns to the US, but we see this fruit, you know, kind of tightly clustered together on top of a wooden table. There's very little background. It's really just tonal. We also see the details of the carved edge of the table, but it's also this, this real delight in exploring light and its effect on the subject matter, this real wonderful exploration of browns. And I think one of the, we talked before about the sense of atmosphere in Johnson's paintings, which was something I, that has just continued to emerge over and over again. And Sanford Robinson Gifford was one of his closest friends as well. And when I think of Gifford, I do think of atmosphere. I think, you know, the relationship of air and water and land and light and how he's all fusing them together into this kind of gorgeous space that dissolves. And I never really thought of Johnson's art and Gifford's art as having that much of a relationship and having them together in the show, which was originally done because of their personal relationship really brought out, I think to me, seeing them together aspects in Johnson's work that felt quite lovely. - The Gifford in the show is Marsha's of the Hudson from 1878, it's kind of classic Gifford. Big open land, air, sky, water, kind of merging into one, the kind of expansive space that Johnson does not paint. But in terms of painting atmosphere, yeah, absolutely. Painting I should have mentioned earlier when we were talking about Johnson and his Dutchness is what might be the most Dutch portrait he ever painted. Harold McGuffie from about 1882, a painting that was at the Corcoran, one of those deaccessions, the Corcoran deaccession, it wasn't part of the National Gallery situation. It's one of those paintings you know is somewhere else and go, how did they think that wasn't a fit? But I'm gonna get yelled at for that. But it's a terrific painting of a boy, just kind of emerging from the brown gloom and kind of the best young Yvonne Leibens or Garrett Du kind of way. - And he's got that nice, kind of fluffy, white-ish color on too. So yeah, that portrait is also felt important to include to kind of let people know what happened to Johnson after he's making the work that's the real thrust of the exhibition, the main paintings. So the genre painting is really the focus of what he's producing in the 1860s and 1870s, but he had started his career as a portrait artist. He was making charcoal and chalk drawings of people first in Maine and then in Washington and Boston, eventually creating drawings of real luminaries of the period of Nathaniel Hawthorne, of Dolly Madison, et cetera. - Hammerson. - Yes, exactly, exactly. We're going back to him, always. But he, in the 1880s, starts painting portraits again, primarily working for patrons on commission, in this case, painting his patrons' son. And I think some of that is in keeping with the fashion of the period. Johnson had also, at this point, had his own children, that was married, had, you know, expenses to keep up with. And it was hard work to make genre paintings to, in the way that Johnson did. And particularly with paintings like the Maple Sugar paintings or his Nantucket series, which can often be quite complex, you know, lots of figures, lots of assembly in the studio of sketches and of trying to figure out how these disparate parts come together. - Into one. So I think portraiture was appealing, as he got older, and it was practical. And he still made genre paintings every now and then. But, you know, we even see the works that he's presenting at the National Academy in the latter decades of his life. I think he only shows three genre paintings of everything that he's exhibiting. And so, you know, he really, really has an artistic shift. But there is that thread of continuity in terms of influence and atmosphere and this interest in light and in something emerging from the background. So he retains the ideas of it, but at least in terms of some of the formal qualities, even as he totally shifts gears in terms of his subjects. - Sarah Humphreyville, thanks very much. - Thank you. (upbeat music) - That's all for this week's show. The Modern Art Notes Podcast is edited by Wilson Butterworth. Special thanks to Steve Roden, who created the sound for the program. The Modern Art Notes Podcast is released under a Creative Commons license. Please visit Modern Art Notes for more information.
