About This Stamp
The 46th stamp in the Black Heritage series honors author Ernest J. Gaines (1933–2019). Best known for such novels as The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman and A Lesson Before Dying, Gaines drew from his childhood as the son of sharecroppers on a Louisiana plantation to explore the untold stories of rural African Americans.
The stamp art is an oil painting of Gaines based on a 2001 photograph.
Ernest J. Gaines was born on River Lake Plantation in the town of Oscar just outside New Roads, Louisiana, where his family had lived in the former slave quarter for five generations. He moved to California in 1948, but for decades afterward, his fiction reflected a deep and unbreakable connection to the rural Louisiana of his youth.
After serving in the Army for two years and graduating from college, Gaines received a prestigious fellowship in 1958 to study creative writing at Stanford University. He published his first novel, Catherine Carmier, in 1964, but he achieved true fame, widespread acclaim, and a Pulitzer Prize nomination in 1971 with The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, a novel chronicling the recollections of its 110-year-old African American protagonist, whose life spans slavery to the civil rights era.
In 1981, Gaines took a position teaching creative writing at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette (then known as the University of Southwestern Louisiana) and soon became the university’s Writer-in-Residence. In 1983, he published the novel A Gathering of Old Men, in which a group of African American men assert their humanity and pride in the face of long-standing prejudice and violence.
In 1993, Gaines published his most critically and popularly acclaimed novel, A Lesson Before Dying, about a college-educated African American teacher who provides education and inspiration to a young farmhand awaiting execution for murder. Over the course of their difficult visits in prison, they form a bond that shows both of them the need to resist those who would deny them their dignity and self-respect. In addition to earning the National Book Critics Circle Award, A Lesson Before Dying resulted in Gaines receiving a prestigious MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Fellowship.
In 2013, Gaines accepted the National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama, calling it the greatest honor he had ever received. Today the Baton Rouge Area Foundation continues to endow an annual Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence, which recognizes excellent African American fiction writers who are just beginning to rise to national prominence.
Mike Ryan designed this stamp with art by Robert Peterson. Greg Breeding served as art director.
The Ernest J. Gaines 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
Greg Breeding
Greg Breeding is a graphic designer and principal of Journey Group, a design company he co-founded in 1992, located in Charlottesville, Virginia. He was creative director until 2013, at which time he began serving as president and continued in that role through 2023.
Breeding’s fascination with modernism began while studying design at Virginia Commonwealth University. His affinity with the movement continues and motivates his ongoing advanced studies at the Basel School of Design in Switzerland most every summer.
As an art director for postage stamp design since 2012, Breeding has designed more than 100 stamps covering a diverse array of subjects, from Star Wars droids and Batman to Harlem Renaissance writers and the transcontinental railroad.
His work has been recognized in annual design competitions held by Graphis, AIGA, PRINT magazine, and Communication Arts.
Breeding lives in North Garden, Virginia, with his wife and enjoys nothing so much as frolicking on the floor with his grandchildren.
Stamp Designer
Mike Ryan
Born and raised in Richmond, Virginia, Mike Ryan was creatively inspired by his father, a pressman. In 2002, he graduated from James Madison University with a B.A. in fine arts with a concentration in graphic design. After working as a designer at Think Design in Richmond from 2002 to 2003, he spent two years at Tradeshowdirect.com before moving to Journey Group in 2005. He served as Journey’s design director from 2007 to 2015, when he became the firm’s creative director. The U.S. Postal Service® Edgar Allen Poe Commemorative Edition booklet, which he designed was featured in the PRINT Regional Design Annual and the HOW International Design Annual. Ryan's stamp designs for the U.S. Postal Service include Have a Ball! (2017), State and County Fairs (2019), Backyard Games (2021), Ernest J. Gaines (2023), and School Bus (2023).
Stamp Artist
Robert Peterson
Specializing in figure painting with an emphasis on portraiture, Robert Peterson has earned praise for his empowering depictions of people of color. Born in 1981, Peterson studied fashion design at Parsons School of Design in New York for three semesters. A self-taught artist, he took up painting in 2012, the day his doctor told him he would need major surgery to replace a hip. After leaving the doctor’s office, he purchased a $6 paint set and a $7 double canvas and created his first work. He cites his surgery as giving him a new appreciation for love, life, and art. Peterson held his first solo exhibition in March 2013 in New York City. In the decade since, his paintings have been exhibited at major art fairs in Miami, New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, and his work has become much in demand with collectors, celebrities, and major corporations. In 2016, the Oklahoma Arts Council named him Artist of the Year for Southwest Oklahoma, making him the first black man to receive the distinction. In 2017, he was named Spectrum Spotlight Artist of the Year at Art Basel Miami Beach.
“My art is my truth and my voice,” Peterson explains. “It reflects a softer side of black people often not portrayed in the media and yet it still finds a way to show our strength and resilience, something that I want to see more of in galleries and museums.” Peterson lives in Lawton, Oklahoma, with his wife and three children. The 2023 Ernest J. Gaines stamp, the 46th stamp in the Black Heritage series, is his first project for the U.S. Postal Service.