Update Info: Following is an article we posted on July 8. To go to details from the National Postal Museum regarding the exhibit and to see 15 of the stamp portraits, click here.

NPM Presents Postage Stamp Art By Bill McAllister, Washington Correspondent

Copyright 2003 Linn's Stamp News, Sidney, Ohio USA. Reproduced with permission.

Elvis is going to be at the National Postal Museum this summer. And officials of the Washington attraction are hoping that the entertainer whose 1993 stamp set a modern-era sales record that still stands will do the same for their facility.

The original art of the young Elvis that the public selected for a commemorative stamp as well as 99 other pieces of original stamp art will go on display July 30 as the museum celebrates its 10th anniversary. That stamp, which created a furor within the stamp collecting community, brought back a flood of happy memories for both Alan Kane, director of the museum, and Terrence McCaffrey, manager of stamp development for the United States Postal Service, as they discussed the upcoming show during a press conference on June 17.

“Elvis is still the king,” noted McCaffrey, recalling that the public squirreled away $36 million worth of the Presley stamps. That’s a record that no other [modern commemorative] stamp has equaled, he added.

Kane, who was marketing director of the Postal Service in 1993, said the Presley stamp was his favorite stamp too, recalling how eagerly the public participated in the postcard balloting for the Presley design. About 1.2 million people cast ballots in the selection process ordered by then Postmaster General Anthony M. Frank, Kane said.

“But we had to print 10 million ballots because the public kept taking them from the post offices and saving them as souvenirs,” Kane said.

For McCaffrey, the Presley stamp, which some members of the Citizens’ Stamp Advisory Committee opposed, marked a watershed.

“Elvis changed everything,” McCaffrey said. After the stamp was issued, the public clamored for more contemporary designs and for brighter and more colorful designs.

The exhibit, titled “Art of the Stamp,” will run until February 2004 at the museum, located on Capitol Hill. It will show a range of stamp designs from Norman Rockwell’s pencil sketch for the 4˘ Boy Scout commemorative of 1960 to the recently issued 37˘ Audrey Hepburn commemorative stamp.

There’s even one of the Postal Service’s most famous goofs in the exhibit. The design of the Bill Pickett Wild West rodeo rider stamp had to be hurriedly painted by artist Mark Hess after postal officials discovered that they had included the wrong man, his brother, on their pane of Legends of the West in 1994.

There is one computer-generated stamp design the recent 33˘ Black Widow Spider stamp from the 1999 Insects and Spiders stamp sheet. Plans to include the recently issued 37˘ Cesar Chavez commemorative had to be scratched when officials discovered that there is no single piece of art that was used for the computer-generated design.

The artist used one computer design for the image of the labor leader and another for the California grape fields in the background. But McCaffrey said putting the two designs out for display didn’t work well.

What museum officials are hoping will be the big draw is, of course, Elvis. Not only is the design by Mark Stulzman going to be exhibited but so will five other concepts that other artists created in hopes of winning what became one of the country’s most celebrated stamp-design contests. A sample ballot and a postal lobby poster about the Presley contest will also go on display. Another big favorite is Michael Deas, the New Orleans artist whose portraits of actor James Dean and actress Marilyn Monroe were used for the first two stamps in the Legends of Hollywood series.

Deas also painted Hepburn, Cary Grant and Hawaiian surfer Duke Kahanomoku, whose stamp designs will also be on display. The show will feature a second Rockwell design, for the 1963 commemorative stamp marking the centennial of city mail delivery. The stamp art exhibit is a smaller version of an exhibit that opened last year at a Norman Rockwell museum in Massachusetts. It is organized into a number of categories: flora and fauna, American history, arts and entertainment, the American scene, love, American legends, on the land and in the air, athletics, and science.

Kane said the museum plans a number of events to mark its 10th anniversary including a return to Washington of a number of officials who played key roles in the establishment of the museum, a joint venture of the Smithsonian Institution and the Postal Service. The stamp collection of Queen Elizabeth II will follow the stamp art exhibit as one of the anniversary year attractions, Kane said.

David Umansky, the museum’s associate director for external affairs, said that if the Rockwell museum show is an example, “It’s Elvis that will bring them in.”

The announcement of the exhibit coincided with another announcement by the Postal Service that framed reproductions of stamp art would be sold to the public under a new licensing agreement. The museum exhibit and the marketing campaign are different initiatives, officials said.