LGBT Pride Month is held in June to commemorate the Stonewall uprising, when patrons and supporters at a gay-friendly tavern in New York City led a protest against persecution. The 1969 incident served as a rallying cry for the LGBT community to increase its visibility and efforts to advocate for equality.
Throughout the years, the Postal Service has honored several gay, lesbian and bisexual Americans, including artist Ellsworth Kelly, whose works were featured on the below stamps released May 31.
Characterized by precise shapes rendered in bold, flat colors, Ellsworth Kelly’s art encompasses painting, sculpture and works on paper, drawing on careful observations of light and shadow, negative space, and line and form. In painting shapes — like a tennis court, a smokestack on a tugboat, or the roof of a barn — as flat planes of color, Kelly removed their dimensionality and turned reality into abstraction. He was also one of the first artists to create shaped canvases and to integrate art with modern architecture, taking great care in the decisions he made about the size of a painting, its boundaries, and its placement in relation to walls and floors.
Even late in his career, Kelly continued to refine his vision, constantly returning to his notebooks and earlier works to further develop ideas and explore new directions. Fittingly, his last work, an ambitious free-standing building titled Austin, seamlessly melds color, sculpture and architecture into a single experience.
Kelly received the National Medal of Arts in 2013. Today his work is in the permanent collections of major museums in the U.S. and around the world.
Kelly received the National Medal of Arts in 2013. Today his work is in the permanent collections of major museums in the U.S. and around the world.
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