The late San Francisco-based Japanese American sculptor Ruth Asawa is the latest artist to be honoured by the US Postal Service (USPS), with a series of ten stamp designs featuring her suspended looped-wire works, now available for pre-order on the agency’s website. Asawa has called the sculptures a “form [that came] from observing plants, the spiral shell of a snail, seeing light through insect wings, watching spiders repair their webs in the early morning and seeing the sun through the droplets of water suspended from the tips of pine needles while watering my garden”.
The black-and-white stamps, sold in sheets of 20 for $11, have been designed by the USPS art director Ethel Kessler and feature images of works made between 1954 and 1996. The artist, who was born in California, began her signature series in the late 1940s, when she found herself “experimenting with wire [and] interested in the economy of a line, enclosing three-dimensional space”, according to the gallery David Zwirner, which represents her estate.
