Beth Zaiken

For more than two hundred years, the United States has put Liberty on its coins the same way: as a woman. Seated, striding, crowned with stars, wrapped in a flag. Beth Zaiken looked at that long tradition and did something almost no one had tried. She made Liberty an animal.

On the 2021 American Liberty gold coin, Liberty is a wild American mustang, caught mid-buck, throwing a western saddle off its back. There is no rider. That absence is the entire idea. "Because I've shown the animal saddled but with no human in sight," Zaiken has said, "it asks the viewer to relate not with the absent rider but with the ridden — to see themselves in the spirit of a powerful creature that refuses to be broken by oppression of any kind and yearns to be free." The saddle flying loose stands for the yoke of British rule, thrown off in the Revolution.

Here is the part that makes it click. Zaiken did not come from the world of coins. She is a paleoartist — an illustrator who reconstructs extinct and living animals for museums, the person who paints the mammoth on the wall behind the skeleton. Drawing a horse that moves, that has weight and muscle and fury, is exactly what she does for a living. The Mint hired an animal painter, and she gave them an animal.

The design won Best Gold Coin in the Coin of the Year (COTY) awards — the closest thing the field has to an Oscar — announced in February 2023. It was one of her first coins.

Zaiken graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2008, one of the country's most demanding art schools. In 2009 she joined Blue Rhino Studio in Minneapolis, a firm that builds exhibits for museums, zoos, and cultural centers around the world, and rose to lead muralist. Her day job is enormous in scale: large murals and dioramas of prehistoric and modern animals — the SUE the T. rex mural at Chicago's Field Museum, an ice-age scene the length of a wall at the Royal Alberta Museum, work in Panama's Biomuseo and a Kuwait cultural center. It is good enough that the science community itself has honored it: she won the John J. Lanzendorf–National Geographic PaleoArt Prize, the field's top art award, twice — in 2020 and again in 2023.

That background changes how she thinks about a coin. "I see coins as miniature exhibits you carry in your pocket," she has said — "all are intended to communicate and educate." A mural and a coin face the same problem at opposite scales: you get one image and a few seconds of a stranger's attention, and the picture has to say something true. When she reconstructs an extinct animal, she works "like a journalist" — "I have to do the Five Ws and the How." She brought that same rigor to a horse.

Her signature is the living, breathing animal — anatomy you trust, motion you feel. The mustang on the gold coin is not a heraldic emblem standing stiffly in profile. It is a real horse in a real moment, and that realism is what carries the meaning. She is careful about that meaning, too. The mustang, she points out, is "the ultimate American icon" precisely because of its tangled history: "They are as native to this land as possible, yet simultaneously an immigrant to the nation as we know it today." Horses evolved in North America, vanished after the last ice age, and returned only when Spanish colonists' escaped animals went wild on the plains — at once native and newcomer, exactly like the country.

One thing to be honest about: there is no famous feud here. Some coin artists are remembered as much for fighting the Mint as for their designs. Zaiken's story is the quieter kind — an outside specialist who brought a discipline the Mint did not already have, whose first major coin walked off with the top prize, and who has since become one of the Mint's most prolific designers.