About This Stamp
With the release of these four stamps, the U.S. Postal Service celebrates Day of the Dead, an increasingly popular holiday in the United States.
Each of the pane’s five identical rows includes four colorful stamps featuring several iconic elements of a traditional Day of the Dead ofrenda, or offering. Stylized, decorated “sugar skulls” are personalized as four family members, one per stamp: a child with a hair bow, a father sporting a hat and mustache, a mother with curled hair, and another child. The lit candles flanking each sugar skull are beacons to guide deceased loved ones on their annual return journey to the land of the living. Dotting each stamp and adorning their shared vertical borders are marigolds (cempazuchitles), the most popular Day of the Dead flower. The vibrant colors of the flowers and other embellishments, along with the white of the sugar skulls, stand out brightly from the stamps’ black background.
With roots in pre-Columbian Latin America, Dia de los Muertos resulted from the meeting of Indigenous traditions and practices introduced by the Catholic missionaries who arrived with the Spanish colonizers in the late 1500s. The modern version of the holiday rose out of the activism of the 1970s, when Chicano artists in California saw it as a way to build pride in Mexican culture.
Today hundreds of thousands of Americans from all walks of life flock to celebrations hosted each November by museums, galleries, and community centers. They are drawn by the exuberant processions, skeleton costumes and face painting, music, dancing, special food, and arts-and-crafts workshops, and by the ofrendas honoring not only departed family members but also heroes and celebrities.
It is no wonder that Day of the Dead, with all its exuberant color, life-affirming joy, and appeal for the whole family, is fast becoming a popular American holiday.
Luis Fitch designed and illustrated the stamps. Antonio Alcalá was the art director.
The Day of the Dead stamps are being issued as Forever® stamps. These Forever stamps will always be equal in value to the current First-Class Mail® one-ounce rate.
Stamp Art Director
Antonio Alcalá
Antonio Alcalá served on the Postmaster General’s Citizens' Stamp Advisory Committee from 2010 until 2011, when he left to become an art director for the U.S. Postal Service's stamp development program.
He is founder and co-owner of Studio A, a design practice working with museums and arts institutions. His clients include: the National Gallery of Art, Library of Congress, National Portrait Gallery, National Museum of Women in the Arts, The Phillips Collection, and Smithsonian Institution. He also lectures at colleges including the Corcoran College of Art + Design, SVA, Pratt, and MICA.
In 2008, his work and contributions to the field of graphic design were recognized with his selection as an AIGA Fellow. He has judged international competitions for the Society of Illustrators, American Illustration, AIGA, and Graphis. Alcalá also serves on the Smithsonian National Postal Museum and Poster House Museum’s advisory councils. His designs are represented in the AIGA Design Archives, the National Postal Museum, and the Library of Congress Permanent Collection of Graphic Design.
Alcalá graduated from Yale University with a BA in history and from the Yale School of Art with an MFA in graphic design. He lives with his wife in Alexandria, Virginia.
Stamp Designer, Stamp Artist
Luis Fitch
Three forces set Luis Fitch on his career path. Growing up in Tijuana, Mexico, provided him with an appreciation for multiple and intertwined cultures. His mother exposed him to museums and art and passed along her love of learning. And from his stepfather, an architect, came the revelation that design was something one could do for a living. After the family moved to San Diego in 1985, Fitch enrolled at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California and graduated with a B.F.A. in 1990.
His first job, with a firm in Columbus, Ohio, allowed Fitch to hone his skills in cross-cultural design and communication. In 1995, he and his wife, Carolina Ornelas, moved to Minneapolis when he was hired by a firm with multinational clients such as Target, Pillsbury, and General Mills, all eager to market to the nation’s growing Latinx market. Four years later, the couple established UNO Branding, a cross-cultural design agency and art studio that has worked with a long list of educational and cultural institutions, public radio and television outlets, nonprofit organizations, and corporations in the United States and Mexico.
Fitch often explores traditional Mexican themes and techniques in his artwork and has devoted considerable energy to the skull motifs associated with Day of the Dead. He has exhibited in solo and group shows around the United States, as well as in Mexico and Chile. In addition, his artwork has been featured in a variety of design magazines and in two books: Hecho In Minnesota – Posters Designed by UNO Branding (2012), and ¡Amigas Forever! (2009).
Fitch and his family live in Minneapolis.
Day of the Dead is his first stamp project for the U.S. Postal Service.
