—a 40-page softbound book that showcases stamps honoring our national pastime—is filled with the beautiful paintings of artist Graig Kreindler. Here is his story.

As a boy, Graig Kreindler loved to look at the illustrated portraits of players on his father’s old baseball cards. Poring over the collection, made up of gems from the 1950s, eventually led to a minor epiphany. “You could kind of see,” Kreindler, who grew up in Rockland County, New York, said, “how art and baseball could come together.”

Not that the 32-year-old painter needed a push toward the sport. He was, after all, named after New York Yankees third baseman Graig Nettles. A lifelong baseball fan, Kreindler has spent his adult years depicting the athletes he grew up adoring. His stunning paintings have been displayed nationwide, in museums and books.

In truth, Kreindler didn’t always like to paint. “I was scared of color,” he said. Plus, he added, “I really only enjoyed painting if I was painting something that I had interest in.” Then a college assignment—he attended the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan—fulfilled that requirement. The task was to depict a relationship. “For whatever reason I thought about the relationship between a pitcher and a batter,” he said. He ended up entering the finished product, a vertical painting of Mickey Mantle at bat, in a New York Society of Illustrators competition. At that point, he knew he’d hit on something.

“Anything other than baseball just didn’t feel right,” he said.

Kreindler graduated from college in 2002 and began his professional career. His paintings aren’t merely vague interpretations of baseball scenes. Hours of research precedes each one. “It usually starts with an image,” Kreindler said. “Then I go from there.” Take, for example, the Jackie Robinson painting featured in Play Ball! A Celebration of Baseball’s Greatest Moments. It’s based on a photograph that Kreindler found. The lighting in the picture, he said, was spectacular. “Right away,” he said of the image, of Robinson sliding into home, “I thought this could be a great painting.”

From there, Kreindler gets to work. First, he’ll scour a variety of news sources to help determine when the photo was taken, ideally down to the exact date, game, and even the inning. (Baseball box scores are widely available and contain a wealth of information.) The HBO documentary series When It Was a Game, which made use of color home-movie footage, has been another great resource. Kreindler is a stickler for detail. No element—including uniforms, ballpark advertisements, the weather—is ignored.

“If you show somebody an image, if you show him a photo or a painting of Mickey Mantle, if I’ve done it right, it will transport him to being a kid,” Kreindler said. “I think in general, the best art is able to elicit some sort of emotional response. Baseball just registers with so many people in that way.”

To see more of Kreindler’s work, visit graigkreindler.com.

The civil rights movement received a major victory in the fight for equality with the passage of the Civil Rights Act on July 2, 1964.

Initiated by President John F. Kennedy in 1963, the bill was designed to outlaw racial discrimination and segregation in public places. President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the bill into law in 1964, ensuring legal protection against voting registration and employment inequality for African Americans and women.

(The stamp above, which features a detail from “Dixie Café” by Jacob Lawrence, was issued in 2005 as part of the To More A More Perfect Union stamp pane.)

As the trailblazing publisher of Ebony, Jet, and other magazines aimed primarily at an African-American audience, John H. Johnson, whose stamp was issued earlier this year, was uniquely situated to comment on and influence prevailing American culture. Ebony in particular played an important role in the civil rights movement, by providing important coverage of protest marches and other events. Even during tension-filled times in the Deep South, photographers from Ebony—white or black, depending on the circumstances—were on the scene to capture the news.

It’s no surprise, then, that the President sought out Johnson in early 1964, before the passage of the Civil Rights Act. What was the President after? In short, support from the black media for his efforts against racial discrimination. “As soon as I crossed the threshold, the president started talking,” wrote Johnson, “telling me what he had done and was doing for Black people and that he didn’t see why Jet was always criticizing his administration and picking at this and that.”

Johnson promised the President would receive only fair coverage in his magazines.

After that first meeting, the President began to meet regularly with Johnson and other African-American publishers. In fact, Johnson and the President became friends. “I was invited to the White House so many times,” he later wrote, “I was embarrassed to tell my friends.”

Johnson says little about the Civil Rights Act in his 1989 autobiography, Succeeding Against the Odds. But the impact of his publications on the civil rights movement in the 1960s and vice versa, before and after its passage, is clear. “I must have been doing something right,” he stated with modesty, “for my leading magazines reached all-time highs in the sixties, and we received unprecedented acclaim in the Black and White communities. When we celebrated the twentieth anniversary of Ebony in November 1965, Ebony was selling 900,000 copies a month, and its three sister magazines, Jet, Tan, and Negro Digest, were selling a total of 2.3 million copies a month.”

Wow!

Intrigued and want to learn more about John H. Johnson? Try the for biographical information, a timeline, quotations, and other goodies, including a full pane of stamps!

The All-Encompassing Vision of Sculptor Isamu Noguchi

Posted on May 2, 2012 by USPS Stamps

“Everything is sculpture,” Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi once said. “Any material, any idea without hindrance born into space, I consider sculpture.”

Noted for merging Western and Eastern influences, Noguchi expanded the definition of sculpture with creations that ranged from portraiture and abstract sculpture to graceful meditation gardens and sprawling landscapes. One of his most prominent works of the 1980s was a Japanese-inspired garden for a corporate center in California that included elements representing the local topography.

Art director Derry Noyes wanted to make sure that the stamps issued in 2004 on the 100th anniversary of Noguchi’s birth captured as many aspects of the artist’s work as possible, from the abstract to the representational and from the functional to the purely artistic.”I wanted to show the breadth of Noguchi’s work,” she says. “I was thrilled to be able to show an Akari lamp, because he was so famous for those, and I think it’s important for the public to see it alongside a very accessible portrait and some of his other, more abstract works. I think you really get a sense of Noguchi’s range, as well as his eye for detail.”

The resulting stamps highlight the work of a masterful artist whose creations prompt even the most casual viewer to pause and examine them further. “My hope,” says Noyes, “is that people will see these stamps and understand that his work really speaks to a broad range of human experience.”

If you could design a set of Noguchi stamps, which of his pieces would you include? Let us know in the comments.

Reproduced with permission of The Isamu Noguchi Foundation Inc., New York.

USPS Stamp of Approval

Tag Archives: artist

Painting Our Pastime: An Interview With Artist Graig Kreindler

The Picasso of Jazz

Publisher John H. Johnson and the 1964 Civil Rights Act

The Legacy of Maurice Sendak

The All-Encompassing Vision of Sculptor Isamu Noguchi