The ceremony for the stamps is free and open to the public. News of the stamp is being shared with the hashtag #HarrietPowersStamps.
Along the way, Harriet Powers began creating quilts and completed at least five. Of the five, it is known that two are referred to as story quilts because each of their panels features a pieced, appliquéd, and embroidered scene from a familiar story drawn from local lore or the Bible.
In 1886, Powers entered her “Bible Quilt” in a local fair, most likely the second annual Northeast Georgia Fair, in Athens. There, a young white art teacher named Jennie Smith fell in love with it and tried to purchase it. Powers initially turned her down but sold her the quilt a few years later.
Smith displayed the piece in the Negro Building of the 1895 Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta, and several Atlanta University faculty wives were so impressed they decided to commission a new quilt from Powers as a gift for the vice president of the university board, Charles Cuthbert Hall. The “Pictorial Quilt,” completed in 1898, remained in the Hall family for 62 years.
Derry Noyes, an art director for USPS, had worked on previous stamps featuring quilts but never thought of these works of fabric art as canvases for telling stories. “This is what is extraordinary about Harriet Powers’s quilts,” she said. Noyes chose details that would hold up well at stamp size and still communicate the stories Powers was trying to tell, and looked for variety and color combinations that worked well together.
Each of the four stamps in the pane of 20 features a panel selected from Powers’s “Pictorial Quilt.” Noyes took a novel approach to arranging the panels. “I wanted the pane to look as if there were more than just four different scenes,” she said. “By changing the starting order at the beginning of each row I was able to create the impression of a multitude of scenes”.
Powers’s other existing work, the “Bible Quilt,” now belongs to the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. The donor shipped it to the museum in 1968 through the U.S. Mail.
The Harriet Powers stamps are being issued as Forever stamps and will always be equal to the current First-Class Mail 1-ounce price.
Customers may purchase stamps and other philatelic products through the The Postal Store at usps.com/shopstamps, by calling 844-737-7826, by mail through USA Philatelic or at Post Office locations nationwide. For officially licensed stamp products, shop the USPS Officially Licensed Collection on Amazon. Additional information on stamps, first-day-of-issue ceremonies and stamp-inspired products can be found at stampsforever.com.