JOIN US! The awards presentation: Saturday, November 1, at the Center for Contemporary Art in Rockland, ME
Doors open at 5:30 PM | Presentation starting at 6:00 PM. All supporters and friends of Sarah, Gabriel, and the MCA are welcome to attend. Registration is not required, but strongly encouraged.
The Maine Crafts Association proudly announces Sarah Haskell as the MCA Maine Craft Artist Award recipient.
Each year, the Maine Crafts Association recognizes artists whose achievements exemplify excellence in the field of craft with the Maine Craft Artist Award. The award honors individuals who have made a significant impact on Maine’s craft community through their work, mentorship, and advocacy.
Recipients are selected by an appointed juror according to benchmarks of excellence in craftsmanship, inspired design, a distinctive artistic voice, and a career of service to the field. The 2025 honorees were chosen from a pool of public nominations by Amy Hausmann, Executive Director of the Maine Arts Commission.
“Sarah Haskell’s mastery of traditional hand-dyeing and hand-weaving reflects a deep reverence for the timeless role of textiles as vessels for storytelling and human connection. Using botanical dyes made from plants and minerals, she transforms linen, cotton, and paper into richly layered works that honor both material and process. Her practice embraces the ancient rhythms of weaving, embroidery, and crochet, pairing them with transformative techniques like rust dyeing, compost dyeing, and weathering. These meditative methods reveal and honor the beauty in impermanence and echo the cycles of natural growth, decay, and renewal that connect all living things. In Sarah’s hands, cloth becomes language – each thread a phrase, each stitch a gesture – telling universal stories of love, loss, and belonging.” – Amy Hausmann
Sarah Haskell is a New England-born textile artist with a BFA from RISD and a Master’s in Art and Healing from Wisdom University. Her work centers on the intersection of text and textile, using thread as her primary medium to explore the hidden language of cloth. She has exhibited nationally at institutions such as the 9/11 Memorial Museum in NYC, the Portland Museum of Art, and the Fuller Craft Museum.
Haskell creates textiles that carry stories of connection and belonging. Working with natural dyes made from plants and minerals, she transforms linen, cotton, and paper into complex, layered works. Through weaving, embroidery, and crochet, her work seeks to define a personal truth and collective wisdom – meditative pieces that embrace impermanence and reflect the natural cycles of growth, decay, and renewal. In Haskell’s work, cloth becomes a language, each thread and stitch contributing to universal stories of love, loss, and the ties that unite us. Haskell’s technical mastery is also widely respected; many weavers continue to rely on her expertise with the Macomber loom, shared through her blog established in 2009, and a self-published booklet still in circulation today.
Community engagement has long been central to Haskell’s work. Her first project, Each One: The Button Project, a 9/11 Memorial (2001–2002), honored the over 3,000 lives lost on September 11 through a participatory weaving project.
In 2008, she launched Woven Voices, Messages from the Heart, a global peace initiative that engaged participants over four years, blending creativity and collective reflection. From 2015 to 2017, Well Used, Well Loved explored age, beauty, attachment, and impermanence using handwoven dish towels and reflective writing, involving over 50 households across the U.S.
Her Mandala Community Weaving project, created in 1999, has been presented to more than 200 organizations and schools nationwide. Haskell continues to design and guide interactive, inclusive, intergenerational projects that culminate in vibrant, illustrative bodies of work.
Haskell is a two-time participant of the MCA Craft Apprentice Program (2023 and 2025), has been named a 2021 Fellow by the Maine Arts Commission, and has been a four-time finalist for the Greater Piscataqua Artist Advancement Award. She has completed residencies across the U.S., including at Monson Arts, Monhegan Island, Acadia National Park, and the Vermont Studio Center.
Alongside Sarah Haskell, Passamaquoddy basketmaker Gabriel Frey of Orono, Maine, has also been selected as a 2025 Maine Craft Artist Award recipient.
Both honorees will be celebrated at the annual awards presentation on Saturday, November 1, 2025, at 5:30 pm at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art in Rockland. The ceremony will coincide with the CMCA 2025 Biennial exhibition, in which both artists are featured, and will include tributes from guest speakers, the presentation of a handcrafted award pin, and remarks from Maine Crafts Association leadership. Friends, supporters, and the public are warmly invited to register and join in honoring the recipients.
The 2025 Maine Craft Artist Awards are generously supported by the Maxwell | Hanrahan Foundation.
