About This Stamp
The 44th stamp in the Black Heritage series honors playwright August Wilson (1945–2005), who brought fresh perspectives and previously unheard voices to the American stage.
This stamp features an oil painting of Wilson based on a 2005 photograph. Behind Wilson, a picket fence alludes to the title of Fences, one of his best known plays.
In a cycle of plays that dramatize the experiences of African Americans during each decade of the 20th century, Wilson focused on the reality of his characters’ hopes and struggles in the face of daunting odds. Using lyrical language, he blended the emotion of the blues with an insistence on the ennobling distinctiveness of African American history and culture.
Wilson earned the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for two of his plays, making him one of only a handful of American playwrights to receive the prize more than once. Fences, which debuted on Broadway in 1987, dramatizes a family’s wrenching conflicts over issues of responsibility and opportunity in the wake of bias and broken dreams. The Piano Lesson, first staged on Broadway in 1990, focuses on a dispute over a piano that represents a family’s shared traditions and painful history.
Wilson’s other plays explore gentrification, the conflicting values of different generations, African American identity, and the ominous pull of the past. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, the only play not set in Pittsburgh, reveals truths about the exploitation of African American musicians and spotlights the blues as a way of understanding African American life. Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, Wilson’s personal favorite, explores the hardships of African American migration from the rural South to the industrial north and offers profound mystical insights into the tragic legacy of slavery.
Today Wilson is hailed as a trailblazer for helping to bring nonmusical African American drama to the forefront of American theater. Each new staging of his plays is an opportunity to witness his explorations of the ways that history and tradition burden African Americans while also giving them sustenance in their daily lives.
Art director Ethel Kessler designed this stamp with art by Tim O’Brien.
The August Wilson stamp is being issued as a Forever® stamp in panes of 20. This Forever stamp is always equal in value to the current First-Class Mail® one-ounce price.
Stamp Art Director, Stamp Designer
Ethel Kessler
Ethel Kessler is an award-winning designer and art director who has worked with corporations, museums, public and private institutions, professional service organizations, and now, the United States Postal Service.
After earning a B.F.A. in visual communications from the Maryland Institute College of Art, Kessler worked as a graphic designer and project manager for the exhibits division of the United States Information Agency. Her work was distributed internationally on subjects such as Immigration, Entrepreneurship, Renovation of American Cities, and the Bicentennial of 1976. She was also responsible for exhibits in Morocco, Botswana, and El Salvador.
In 1981, she established Kessler Design, Inc., for which she is creative director and designer. Clients have included the Clinton Government reorganization, the Smithsonian Institution, National Geographic Television, the National Park Service, and the American Institute of Architects.
She has been an art director for the U.S. Postal Service’s stamp development program for more than 25 years. As an art director for USPS, Kessler has been responsible for creating more than 500 stamp designs, including the Breast Cancer Research stamp illustrated by Whitney Sherman. Issued in 1998, the stamp is still on sale and has raised more $98 million for breast cancer research. Other Kessler projects include the popular and highly regarded Nature of America 120 stamp series, a collaboration with nationally acclaimed nature illustrator John Dawson, the 12-year Lunar New Year series with Kam Mak, the American Filmmaking: Behind the Scenes 10 stamps issued in 2003, a 2016 pane of stamps celebrating the 100th anniversary of the National Park Service, and the 2023 stamp honoring Supreme Court Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. And many, many others.
Stamp Artist
Tim O'Brien
A native of New Haven, Connecticut, Tim O’Brien earned a bachelor of fine arts degree from Paier College of Art in Hamden, Connecticut, in 1987. He then embarked on a career in illustration and, today, creates intricately detailed illustrations and portraits from his Brooklyn, New York, studio.
O’Brien’s art has appeared numerous times on the cover of TIME and has been featured in Esquire, GQ, Der Spiegel, Rolling Stone, National Geographic, and Playboy. Other clients include advertising agencies and book publishers, such as HarperCollins, Penguin, Scholastic, and Simon & Schuster.
The 2009 winner of the prestigious Hamilton King Award from the Society of Illustrators, which O’Brien currently serves as president, his work has also been recognized by Communication Arts, Graphis, Print, American Illustration, and the Society of Publication Designers. In 2003, O’Brien, an adjunct professor at Pratt Institute, received an honorary doctorate from Lyme Academy of Fine Art.
Numerous speaking engagements include appearances at the United Nations, the Norman Rockwell Museum, the Society of Illustrators, Syracuse University, the School of Visual Arts, Pratt Institute, Rhode Island School of Design, California College of the Arts, Western Connecticut State University, and the University of the Arts in Philadelphia.
O’Brien, a former boxer whose new passion is running marathons, lives in the historic Flatbush section of Brooklyn with his wife, Elizabeth Parisi, and son.
The 2021 August Wilson stamp is O’Brien’s latest project for the Postal Service. Other stamps include Moss Hart (2004), Hattie McDaniel (2006), Judy Garland (2006), Danny Thomas (2012), Shirley Temple (2016), and Father Theodore Hesburgh (2017).
