craft
Gabriel Frey

The Maine Crafts Association has announced Gabriel Frey as a 2025 Maine Craft Artist Award recipient, recognition that honors not just exceptional craftsmanship but a lifetime of cultural stewardship and community building.

Each year, the Maine Crafts Association recognizes artists whose achievements exemplify excellence in craft through the Maine Craft Artist Award. The honor celebrates individuals who have made significant impact on Maine’s craft community through their work, mentorship, and advocacy. Recipients are selected by an appointed juror according to benchmarks including excellence in craftsmanship, inspired design, a distinctive artistic voice, and career-long service to the field. The 2025 honorees were chosen from a pool of public nominations by Amy Haussman, executive director of the Maine Arts Commission.

“Gabriel plays a significant role as a cultural leader, teacher, and connector,” Haussman observed. “His artistry reaches beyond the studio, fostering meaningful connections between Native and non-Native communities through shared creative experiences. His recent collaborative contribution to Tekakapimek at Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument exemplifies his ability to infuse place-based art with deep cultural significance, environmental respect, and a modern aesthetic. His partnership with the fashion brand Manitobah employs traditional weaving to create a line of contemporary leather shoes. In Gabriel’s hands, a woven basket becomes an invitation to engage, to learn, and to participate in the living tradition of Wabanaki culture. His work ensures that this heritage is preserved and actively experienced in daily life, strengthening the ties between people, land, and tradition.”

Gabriel Frey, a Passamaquoddy artist and 13th-generation black ash basketmaker, continues a family tradition passed down since time immemorial. He is widely recognized for his finely crafted pack baskets and for his commitment to pedagogical models that broaden understanding of Indigenous worldviews. His baskets bridge the utility of traditional practice with contemporary aesthetics, holding conversation with the past while looking toward the future.

Woven exclusively from black ash, Frey’s baskets often feature hand-crafted leather straps, lids, and liners. Using his grandfather’s axe, passed down through generations of basketmakers, he locates and harvests basket-quality trees, processes the logs, and transforms the materials into their final form. Each basket incorporates hand-carved elements, including hoops, rims, handles, and wooden pins, while many of his tools — such as molds, gauges, and a shave horse — are adapted from traditional Wabanaki designs.

Frey’s work conveys his love for the natural world and embodies the interconnection of past, present, and future. His baskets carry cultural knowledge, family traditions, personal experiences, and hope for the survival of this precious material, inviting reciprocity between people, the land and all beings.

Frey has served as an MCA Craft Apprentice Program mentor, was named a United States Artist Fellow in 2019, received a Traditional Arts Fellowship from the Maine Arts Commission in 2021, and most recently contributed as a Wabanaki advisor and creator to the development of the Tekαkαpimək Contact Station, opened in June 2025 by the National Park Service. His work has been featured in several recent exhibitions.

Alongside Gabriel Frey, fiber artist Sarah Haskell of York has also been selected as a 2025 Maine Craft Artist Award recipient.

Both honorees will be celebrated at the annual awards presentation at 5:30 p.m. Nov. 1 at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art in Rockland. The ceremony coincides with the CMCA 2025 Biennial exhibition, in which both artists are featured, and will include tributes from guest speakers, presentation of a handcrafted award pin, and remarks from Maine Crafts Association leadership. Friends, supporters, and the public are warmly invited to register and attend.

Learn more at MaineCrafts.org.