This stamp was one of five issued to mark the 100th anniversary of the birth of sculptor Isamu Noguchi, born in Los Angeles in 1904 to an American writer and a Japanese poet. Noguchi split much of his childhood between Japan and the United States, eventually studying briefly at Columbia University before an evening sculpture class redirected his path entirely. He went on to work in Paris under sculptor Constantin Brancusi, and his career came to encompass an unusually wide range of forms, including portrait busts, public plazas, playgrounds, furniture, and stage sets for choreographer Martha Graham.
This particular stamp features Akari 25N, part of a lamp series Noguchi began designing in 1951 after the mayor of Gifu, Japan, a city long known for its traditional paper lantern craft, asked him to help modernize a struggling local industry. Noguchi reworked the traditional folded lantern shape into rounded, sculptural forms, replaced the customary candle with an electric light bulb, and gave the series the name Akari, a Japanese word meaning light that also carries a sense of weightlessness. Each lamp is still handcrafted from washi paper and bamboo ribbing by the same manufacturer that produced the originals, and Noguchi continued adding new designs to the Akari catalog, eventually creating more than one hundred variations, until his death in 1988.
Designer Derry Noyes brought together five representative works for this stamp pane, pairing Akari 25N with Noguchi's Margaret La Farge Osborn, Black Sun, Mother and Child, and Figure. The selvage featured a 1952 photograph of Noguchi alongside his own words, "Everything is sculpture." Together, the set offered a survey of an artist who refused to separate sculpture from everyday design, treating a simple paper lamp with the same creative seriousness he brought to a public plaza or museum commission.
