About This Stamp
With this Priority Mail Express® stamp, the U.S. Postal Service travels to the icy north to celebrate one of nature’s amazing winter spectacles.
During the winter, parts of the Great Lakes become a wonderland of ice. One area of particularly impressive ice formations is Grand Island in Lake Superior. The stamp art features an illustration of how one of these ever changing ice caves might appear from the inside looking out toward the west at sunset. With the shoreline of the mainland visible on the horizon, the sun’s rays are reflected in the pink-hued ice along the floor of the cave’s entrance. The ice formations that resemble stalactites are rendered in various shades of blue, green, and white. Artist Dan Cosgrove created an initial pencil sketch and finished the stamp art digitally.
Located near Munising on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, Grand Island is a hub for outdoor activities in warm weather, with breathtaking overlooks, beautiful sandy beaches, woodlands, and inland lakes. In the cold months, the area has an arresting beauty of another kind.
Formed by advancing and retreating ice sheets in the last ice age, Grand Island is marked by massive sandstone bluffs. Impressive in any season, they are especially dramatic in winter when lake water seeps into the crevices and caverns, forming magnificent ice curtains and icicles that hang like stalactites from ceilings.
If lake conditions are just right in the winter, it is possible to cross to the island. There are adventure tour companies that offer professional guides to lead visitors. However, even during the coldest winter season, there is no guarantee that it is safe to cross to the island. It is never safe to cross the ice at the east channel and never safe at any point by foot. It is always best to check conditions with the Forest Service, the Munising Visitors Bureau, and the Munising Sheriff’s Office. From the shoreline on the mainland north of Munising, the island’s east-shore ice is visible.
The Grand Island Ice Caves stamp is being issued in a pane of four stamps.
Art director Greg Breeding designed the stamp with art by Dan Cosgrove.
Stamp Art Director, Stamp Designer
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 Artist
Dan Cosgrove
A native of Cincinnati, Ohio, Dan Cosgrove graduated from the University of Cincinnati in 1978 with a major in graphic design. After briefly working for the National Park Service in Denver and as a designer at Cato Johnson in Cincinnati, Cosgrove moved to Chicago in 1980 and began a freelance career in digital and traditional illustration.
Cosgrove's designs have appeared in numerous ads, posters, covers, and on packaging. Recent clients include Cunard Line, Dunlop Tire, Fiat, J P Morgan Chase, Miller Brewing Company, Netflix, The New York Times, Shell Oil company, SohoPress, and The Wall Street Journal. In recognition of his work Cosgrove has received awards from Communications Arts and the Society of Illustrators (Gold Medal).
The 2008 Express Mail® and Priority Mail® stamps featuring Mount Rushmore and Hoover Dam were Cosgrove's first projects for the U.S. Postal Service. Since then, Cosgrove has illustrated 27 additional Express Mail and Priority Mail Express stamps. Recent designs include Florida Everglades (Priority Mail) (2023), Great Smoky Mountains (Priority Mail Express) (2023), Monument Valley (Priority Mail) (2022), and Palace of Fine Arts (Priority Mail Express) (2022). He also created the stamp art for USS Missouri (2019).
Cosgrove and his wife live in Clarendon Hills, Illinois.