A new Art of the Skateboard USPS stamp series that includes work by Di’Orr Greenwood (Diné) will be dedicated this weekend as part of the 2023 Cowtown Phoenix AM skateboarding competition.
PHOENIX—Several artists in the Southwest are using skateboards as their canvas, creating works that reflect both skateboard culture and their own cultural heritage. Soon, those connections will get a much wider audience, as the United States Postal Service dedicates a new postage stamp series called Art of the Skateboard at Desert West Skate Park in Phoenix on Friday, March 24, 2023.
The location has special meaning for Di’Orr Greenwood (Diné), one of four artists whose work is featured in the series. Born and raised on the Navajo Nation in northern Arizona, Greenwood recalls skating at the park during her first trip to Phoenix. “When I first skated there, I didn’t even know how to drop in,” she recalls.
Today, her accomplishments include making the semifinals in tryouts for the 2020 U.S. Olympic skateboard team and appearing in a film called The Mystery of Now, which is where Antonio Alcalá, the USPS art director for the Art of the Skateboard series, discovered her work.
“It makes me feel incredibly accomplished, like this is a piece of history now,” Greenwood says of being one of the first Navajo artists to make work for a U.S. postage stamp. “I made a board I’m proud of and I’m so thankful for that.”
Greenwood crafted her own skateboard, then used pyrography, paint, and inlaid turquoise to make her design inspired in part by the Morning Star and Evening Star, which she calls “the most consistent things in my life.” The colors represent the rising sun or sunset. “I wanted to do these color palettes that people can relate to.”
The eagle feathers reference both the USPS logo and the artist’s own cultural heritage. “The feathers have importance to Native American people all across the continent; we pray with them, we do ceremony with them,” she explains. “They’re the closest beings to the holy ones.” Greenwood associates turquoise with providing protection, and says, “I just feel like it gives a [skateboard] life.”
The Art of the Skateboard series also features work by Federico Frum, a Colombia-born artist based in Washington, D.C. who goes by the moniker MasPaz, Virginia-based artist William James Taylor Junior, and Alaska-based artist Crystal Worl (Tlingit Athabascan).
Worl used the formline style that’s prevalent among Indigenous communities in the Northwest to create the blue and indigo salmon design inspired by her cultural heritage. Taylor digitally manipulated his own doodles to create a red-on-orange design dominated by circles and curved lines. And Frum went with a stylized black, white, and gold design centering the jaguar, an animal affiliated with authority and power in some Indigenous cultures.
Alcalá chose all four artists, working to assure the stamps represented a variety of styles. “There are as many skateboards with art on them as there are skateboards in this country, so I knew that it was going to be impossible to represent the full breadth and range and scope of what skateboard art could be,” he says. Instead, Alcalá sought to reflect that diversity by commissioning pieces that balanced different visual languages.
After artists completed their designs, the skateboards were photographed as part of Alcalá’s design process for the series. Every stamp depicts a person holding one of the skateboards with the wheels facing outward. The stamps are “denominated as ‘Forever’ stamps and will always be equal in value to the current first-class mail one-ounce price,” according to USPS materials.
As the dedication approaches, Greenwood is thinking about the many experiences that brought her to this point, from overcoming peers who bullied her for not knowing fancy skate tricks to the first time she used pyrography to make art on decks rather than flutes so she could sell them to pay for tools destroyed in a warehouse fire.
Of course, Greenwood has plenty of memories of family and friends who helped her along the journey. The uncle who gifted her a woodburning tool as a way to redirect her interest in making fires. The brother whose skateboards she used to sneak out when he wasn’t home. The women who taught her the sewing and beadwork skills she translated into making graph templates on the unpainted decks that remind her of empty looms, filled with endless possibilities.
For Greenwood, the Art of the Skateboard stamp series signals greater acceptance of skateboard culture, a growing realization that Native American art is constantly evolving, and expanding opportunities for youth to create and experience community through skating and art.
She’ll be speaking during the stamp dedication, which will be held in conjunction with Cowtown’s twenty-first annual Phoenix AM. The amateur skateboarding competition on Saturday, March 25, and Sunday, March 26, is presented by Cowtown Skateboards, a company that’s worked with numerous artists through the years, including Jacob Meders (Mechoopda/Maidu) and Douglas Miles (San Carlos Apache, Akimel O’odham). Fellow artists and skaters Worl and Frum will be speaking at the celebration as well.
“I really hope to convey the message of not giving up,” says Greenwood. “It’s okay to put it down for a bit and come back around to what you love, even if you’re not good at it, even if you’re just figuring it out. You’ve really got to trust the process and you’ve got to believe that you are worthy of everything.”
The Art of the Skateboard dedication is scheduled to take place at 11 am Friday, March 24, at Desert West Skate Plaza, 6602 West Encanto Boulevard in Phoenix. The USPS encourages people to RSVP if they plan to attend.
