When North Carolina resident Robin Antzoulatos commissioned Potomac’s Jennifer Cash, 48, to create vintage postage stamp art with a hippo theme, she was impressed with the results. Next came Disney-centric stamp art, then bird-themed art—and she hasn’t stopped ordering from Modern Postmarks since.
“I might be Jennifer’s best customer—more than 20 times I have bought her things,” Antzoulatos says. “It’s not just the colors; a lot of detail goes into it.”
Cash caught the stamp collecting bug in elementary school and took it to a new level in 2014, when her father-in-law gave her a collection of several hundred stamps from around the world, a memento from a friend who had passed away.
“Some of the stamps were so beautiful,” Cash says. “I thought, How can I work with them as a medium and display them and get them out of the dusty stamp books?”
Cash started playing around with the vintage stamps, creating themed art for fun and posting photos on her Instagram page. With the help of an X-Acto knife and a craft glue stick, she carved a shape out of cardstock paper, then strategically affixed stamps to another sheet of paper to fill in the cutout form. The result was noteworthy: Friends asked her to make original stamp art for them. She started Modern Postmarks in 2020, creating notecards and one-of-a-kind 5-by-7-inch or 8-by-10-inch wall art.
“Modern Postmarks offers something that is very unique, but it’s also very classic,” says longtime friend and customer Marisa Howard of Washington, D.C. “The real artistry is that she takes something that is so recognizable and makes it into something that no one is likely to find anyplace else.”
Married with two elementary school-age children, Cash works full time in Northern Virginia as a technology adviser and runs Modern Postmarks on the side. She says she crafts each piece around a theme or color, using acid-free, hand-cut cardstock paper inlaid with vintage postage stamps. Cash says she comes up with subjects—butterflies, teapots, states, animals—and also takes custom orders. A typical 8-by-10, one-of-a-kind piece could contain a dozen or so stamps, Cash says, none of any great value monetarily but some that are more than 125 years old.
“Most of my stamp art features stamps from the 1950s to 1990s,” she says. “I don’t use the newer ‘sticker’ backed stamps we use today, but the older ‘gum’ backed stamps.”
Cash collects stamps and has thousands of them, but now people are seeking her out and donating their collections, postmarked and unused stamps included. On the back of each piece of art, she includes any information she has about the names of the stamps and the years in which they were issued.
Howard says she has commissioned numerous pieces from Modern Postmarks, including a retirement gift for a friend. “We chose stamps from all the countries that this person had lived in during their career,” Howard says. “When you see the final product, it’s thrilling.”
Customer and co-worker Jennifer Meyers, who lives in Fairfax, Virginia, also commissioned Cash to make a retirement piece. “When my good friend’s husband retired from the Navy, [Cash] did an anchor and incorporated some naval stamps in it,” Meyers says. “I really appreciate the colors that are employed. It’s not just a design with stamps thrown in the back—there’s a lot of thought into the placement.”
Many of Cash’s customers are from Montgomery County, and she says Maryland-inspired products with flags or crabs are popular. Her 8-by-10-inch odes to the Old Line State—in several versions of crabs—cost $45, feature vintage Maryland stamps and are her most purchased pieces.
Prices for Modern Postmarks products range from $4 for a notecard to $45 for some 8-by-10-inch pieces. Cash sells her wares on Etsy and through local makers markets. She works in a small space in the basement of her home and says she spends about 30 minutes on each piece of art.
It’s a busy side gig: Modern Postmarks has sold around 1,800 items, Cash says. She’s slated to attend Christmas Market/Sip & Shop at St. Patrick’s Catholic School in Rockville on Nov. 14 and the Family Room outdoor Holiday Market in Laytonsville on Nov. 18.
“I try to provide an affordable, unique piece of artwork that people can display in their home,” Cash says. “Some people have a very personal connection with stamps and they resonate with them.”
This story appears in the November/December 2024 issue of Bethesda Magazine.
