WASHINGTON — Big Apple people and places — both real and fictional — are taking center stage at a rare public exhibit of art commissioned by the US Postal Service.
Jerry Seinfeld’s sitcom apartment the Empire State Building and Joe DiMaggio are among dozens of works featured in the homage to New York City at the Smithsonian’s National Postal Museum in Washington, DC.
“It just breathes and articulates what New York City is all about,” said exhibit curator Calvin Mitchell.
The display highlights 30 pieces of art that were turned into stamps, part of the USPS’s collection of 5,000 original artworks it commissioned over the last 70 years.
“I had to agonize over the selection,” Mitchell said.
The 33-cent “Seinfeld” stamp was released in 2000 and shows a partial view of the main character’s fictional Upper West Side apartment, with its door ajar. Other notables works are a 1972 portrait of Mayor Fiorello La Guardia and the 1973 colorful depiction of Broadway’s George Gershwin.
One stamp not on view is the 2011 Statue of Liberty Forever stamp, supposedly in New York Harbor. Because of an embarrassing mistake, the stamp is actually of a replica of Lady Liberty — part of the New York, New York hotel display on the Las Vegas Strip.