Kam Mak

Born in Hong Kong and raised in New York City’s Chinatown, Kam Mak is an award-winning illustrator and painter whose richly colored work has appeared on the covers of books and magazines. He is the author and illustrator of My Chinatown: One Year in Poems and has earned acclaim for his illustrations for The Dragon Prince, The Kite Rider, and other books. Mak also teaches at the Fashion Institute of Technology, where he shares his experience in illustration and painting with emerging artists.

For this stamp pane, he created portraits of John Adams and Esther De Berdt Reed. “Portraying a figure from the American Revolution holds special meaning for me,” he says. “It allows me to give back to the country that welcomed my family and to celebrate the ideals that first inspired our journey here.”