About This Stamp
The crops depicted in the stamp booklet — corn, chili peppers, beans, squashes, and sunflowers — had been cultivated in the Americas for centuries when Europeans first arrived in the New World.
Artist Steve Buchanan created each of the five stamp designs. As reference, he used slide photographs made by his wife Rita Buchanan, a consultant for the stamp project. The slides document Rita Buchanan’s research in the late 1970s on indigenous agricultural methods in the southwestern United States.
The stamp art includes ears of corn (Zea mays); red and green chilies (Capsicum annuum); lima beans (Phaseolus lunatus), scarlet runner beans (P. coccineus), and pintos and other common beans (P. vulgaris); various squashes (Cucurbita spp.); and a sunflower and seeds (Helianthus annuus).
Art Director
Phil Jordan
Phil Jordan grew up in New Bern, North Carolina, and attended East Carolina University. After Army service in Alaska, he graduated from Virginia Commonwealth University with a degree in visual communications. He worked in advertising and in design at a trade association before joining Beveridge and Associates, Inc., where he provided art direction for corporate, institutional, and government design projects. A partner in the firm, he left after 18 years to establish his own design firm where he managed projects for USAir, NASA, McGraw-Hill, IBM, and Smithsonian Books, among others. He was Design Director of Air & Space/Smithsonian magazine for 15 years. His work appeared in numerous exhibitions and publications such as Graphis and Communications Arts. A past president of the Art Directors Club of Metropolitan Washington, he was an art director for the U.S. Postal Service from 1991 to 2014. A resident of Falls Church, Virginia, he is a retired glider pilot and a member of the Skyline Soaring Club.
Stamp Artist
Steve Buchanan
Steve Buchanan was trained as a classical musician at Oberlin College in Ohio and earned his doctorate from the University of Texas in Austin. After eleven years as a university professor and concert pianist, he studied painting with Dennis Nolan at the Hartford Art School and, in 1988, began a successful second career as a freelance illustrator.
Buchanan specializes in natural science illustration and is best known for his botanical and entomological subjects. His clients have included Bayer Corporation, The United Stated Forest Service, The American Arachnological Society, The New York Times, The Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Scientific American, Houghton Mifflin, and Fine Gardening Magazine.
Among Buchanan’s projects for the U.S. Postal Service® are Tropical Flowers and the Insects & Spiders Classic Collection, both issued in 1999; Reptiles & Amphibians (2003); American Motorcycles (2006); La Florida (2013); and Winter Berries (2019).