The ancient native tradition of weaving baskets is now grabbing the attention of the contemporary art world, with one artist taking the form in new directions.

Jeffrey Brown takes us to Maine for our arts and culture series, Canvas.

That one right there is a large healthy brown ash.

You see how similar it looks to the white?

A walk in the woods near his Eddington, Maine home with Jeremy Frey in search of brown ash trees,

whose pliable wood has made them so valued in the Wabonaki Indian basket-making tradition for centuries and for Frey today.

So that right there is a perfect basket tree. You see how straight it is, there's no knots, no branches. I'll be making a basket out of that someday. You will? Yeah.

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 collections

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 wall

baskets one within another.

If you duck way down, there's color under there that you can never see.

I just did that for me.

All of it building on centuries of knowledge and craft.

Weaving is so simple.

It's up, down, over, and under. I mean, it's this simple binary process.

Like you get your ones, you get your zeros, and how do you make that more?

The making of baskets, weaving weaving has been going on for a long, long time.

All over the world.

Yeah.

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