About This Stamp
With this stamp, the U.S. Postal Service® honors Jaime Escalante (1930-2010), the East Los Angeles teacher whose inspirational methods led supposedly “unteachable” high school students to master calculus.
The digital illustration by Jason Seiler depicts Escalante in a style meant to resemble an oil painting. Escalante stands in front of a chalkboard on which calculus symbols are visible. He is wearing his signature flat cap, looking forward toward the viewer. The illustration is based on a photograph taken by Jaime W. Escalante, on May 6, 2005, in the actual classroom at Hiram Johnson High School in Sacramento, California, where his father formerly taught.
Fame came to Escalante in an unexpected — and unhappy — way. In 1982, 18 of his students took the Advanced Placement Calculus Exam. Controversy followed when the testing service accused 14 students of cheating. Escalante suspected that the accusation of cheating was due to the fact that the students were Mexican Americans from a low-income area of Los Angeles. The testing service denied the allegation and proposed a solution: that the 14 students retake the test. Twelve of the 14 did, a different exam from the first, and all passed.
Escalante and his students became instant heroes in the fall of 1982 when the story broke in the news media and attracted the attention of Hollywood filmmakers. The movie Stand and Deliver, released in 1988, garnered good reviews and made Escalante one of the most famous teachers in America.
In 1999, Escalante was inducted into the National Teachers Hall of Fame for his efforts to “have children believe in their ability to achieve.”
Art director Greg Breeding designed the stamp with original art by Seiler.
The Jaime Escalante stamp was issued as a Forever® stamp. This Forever stamp will always be equal in value to the current First-Class Mail® one-ounce price.
Stamp Art Director, Designer, and Typographer
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
Jason Seiler
Jason Seiler grew up in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, where a simple teenage prank helped launch his artistic career. After getting caught drawing parodies of his high school history teacher, Seiler’s principal gave him a job creating caricatures of other faculty members, and an artist was born.
In 1996, Seiler moved to Chicago and spent several years touring with bands as a guitarist and singer, torn between a life as an artist or as a musician. He ultimately chose art and went on to study fine art illustration at the American Academy of Art before becoming a full-time artist. Though Seiler does not consider himself strictly a caricaturist, his paintings and illustrations often include elements of caricature, used to exaggerate and create humor and depth in his subjects.
His work, both humorous and serious, has been featured in numerous publications, including Rolling Stone, TIME, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Business Week, MAD magazine, and The New Yorker. Seiler’s clients have also included Disney, Universal Pictures, Penguin Group, Sony Image, and Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, for which he worked as a character designer. In 2010, Seiler won a silver award from the Society of Illustrators of Los Angeles for his portrait of Elvis Costello.
For several years, Seiler has taught painting and drawing for the online art school Schoolism. Aside from drawing, he loves to skydive and dreams of one day cage diving with great white sharks. Until that day comes, he will spend his time not devoted to art with his two daughters, Isabeau and Ava.
Seiler lives in the Andersonville neighborhood of Chicago. His projects for the U.S. Postal Service® include Celebrity Chefs (2014) and Jaime Escalante (2016).