Four new stamps honor quiltmaker Harriet Powers (1837–1910), a formerly enslaved woman who stitched works that are celebrated as masterpieces of American folk art and storytelling. Just two of her quilts are known to survive.

Art director Derry Noyes had worked on previous stamps featuring quilts but never thought of these works of fabric art as canvases for telling stories. “This is what is extraordinary about Harriet Powers’s quilts,” she says. Noyes chose details that would hold up well at stamp size and still communicate the stories Powers was trying to tell: “I was also looking for variety and color combinations that worked well together.”

Each of the four stamps in the pane of 20 features a panel selected from Powers’s “Pictorial Quilt.” Explaining how she arranged the panels, Noyes says: “I wanted the pane to look as if there were more than just four different scenes. By changing the starting order at the beginning of each row I was able to create the impression of a multitude of scenes.”

Noyes designed the stamps and pane using existing photographs of the Pictorial Quilt, 1895–1898, by Harriet Powers.