Benjamin Sowards

Benjamin Sowards is a painter who teaches for a living and designs coins on the side — and the side work has landed in hundreds of millions of pockets.

Born in 1976, he studied at Brigham Young University and earned a Master of Fine Arts in painting from the Laguna College of Art + Design in California — two schools known for training realist painters, not abstract ones. Since 2001 he has led the illustration program at Southern Utah University, where he teaches both traditional oil painting and digital art. Long before any of his designs reached the Mint, his name was on fully painted book covers, including the bestselling Leven Thumps fantasy series by Obert Skye.

That background is the whole story. Sowards came to coinage as a portrait painter and an illustrator, not as an engraver. He also paints formal portraits — governors, university presidents, philanthropists — the kind of work that teaches you to find a person's character in a face. His coins carry the mark of someone used to filling a whole canvas: faces with mood, scenes with motion.

Sowards has been a member of the U.S. Mint's Artistic Infusion Program since 2014 — the AIP, a roster of outside artists the Mint invites to submit designs alongside its own staff sculptor-engravers. The division of labor matters. An AIP artist draws the design; a Mint sculptor then translates that drawing into the three-dimensional relief — the raised surface — that becomes a coin die. The two names share the credit, which is why Sowards' coins each pair his name with a sculptor's.

His style gets described as nuanced realism with a touch of fantasy, and you can see why the Mint wanted it: his coins lean on character. The Mark Twain portrait he drew shows the writer with a sly, almost devilish expression — a personality, not a stamp. His best-known design, the reverse — the tails side — of the 2021 Washington Crossing the Delaware quarter, is pure narrative: General Washington faces right with his sword drawn and a Dutch telescope in hand, a boat of Continental soldiers fighting the ice behind him. The Mint unveiled it on December 25, 2020 — 244 years to the day after the real 1776 crossing toward Trenton.

When that quarter shipped, NGC — one of the two major coin-grading firms — signed Sowards to hand-sign its certification labels, the same honor it extends to staff Mint engravers. "To join the talented US Mint coin designers, engravers and sculptors in the NGC Signature Label program is an incredible distinction," he said.

For an outside artist, Sowards' output is unusually wide. He started with the First Spouse gold series — coins that pair each presidential spouse with a scene from her life — designing the reverse of the Jacqueline Kennedy coin (released 2015), then the obverse of the Nancy Reagan coin (2016) and the Barbara Bush coin (2020).

When the U.S. Mint launched the American Women Quarters in 2022, two of the early reverses were his: Wilma Mankiller, the first woman elected principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, wrapped in a traditional shawl with the seven-pointed Cherokee star (2022), and the ballerina Maria Tallchief (2023). His commemorative reverses include the 2024 Harriet Tubman $5 gold coin — two cupped hands ringed by her seven core values — and both the gold and silver reverses of the 2024 Greatest Generation program honoring World War II veterans. He also drew the obverse of the U.S. Army Rangers Veterans of World War II Congressional Gold Medal, a 2019 American Veterans silver medal, the reverse of a 2023 Native American $1 coin, and the obverse of the 2020 Donald J. Trump Presidential medal.

It adds up to a designer whose work spans a circulating quarter you might get in change and a one-ounce gold commemorative you would never spend.