Christopher Polentz

Christopher Polentz spent most of his life on the quiet side of the art world. He earned a BFA from ArtCenter College of Design in 1985, taught for decades across Southern California, freelanced as an illustrator, and — from the early 2000s on — built a strange, tender body of personal painting. Not the résumé you expect on legal tender.

Then he saw an ad. The U.S. Mint was recruiting artists, of all places, on Instagram. Polentz applied — and didn't believe it when he got in. He has said he still can't quite believe the whole thing is real.

The ad led to the Mint's Artistic Infusion Program — the AIP, a standing pool of outside artists the Mint draws on to design coins and medals alongside its own staff sculptors. Polentz became one of more than thirty artists in that pool. He has made around twenty designs for the Mint; three have reached metal. Two of them are the front and back of the 2025 American Liberty High Relief Gold Coin — the reason this page exists. His verdict on it was blunt: "It's the best thing I've ever done."

To understand the coin, look first at the paintings. Polentz makes figurative work about people who don't fit — children cast as vulnerable outsiders, drawn from the lost world of the traveling carnival and its sideshow "freaks and geeks" of roughly 1870 to 1930. His subjects are different "through no fault of their own," he has written, "but nonetheless unwanted and made to feel unnecessary." His stated aim is plain and disarming: "I would like my images to nurture compassion for the differences within us all." Acceptance, belonging, dignity — painted with a dark, dreamlike edge.

That sensibility carried straight onto the coin. The American Liberty program exists to reimagine Liberty for the present rather than repeat the same classical goddess every few years. Polentz took the brief somewhere unexpected. For the obverse — the heads side — he drew a honeybee landing on a sunflower.

The choice is not decoration. The bee pollinating the flower stands for the stewardship a free society demands — liberty as something you tend, not something you're handed. And the sunflower hides a structure most people will never notice: its seed-head follows the Fibonacci sequence, the spiral packing pattern that orders a real sunflower's seeds. Polentz called it "a wonderful hidden representation of the people and government arranged in an organized, harmonious fashion working and growing together." A mathematical order, hidden in plain sight, on a coin about self-government. Look to the lower left of the flower and you'll find his initials struck into the gold.

The reverse — the tails side — goes the opposite way. Where the obverse is calm and ordered, Polentz gave the eagle pure motion: a bald eagle caught mid-flight, wings curving into a swirling, almost vertiginous frame around its face. He described it without sentiment: "It's aggressive. It's angular. It's kind of threatening." That tension is the whole point — order on one face, force on the other, two readings of the same idea.

Designing a coin is not the same as painting one. The Mint's medallic artists translate a drawing into three-dimensional relief — the raised sculpture that strikes into metal — and on a high relief coin that sculpting is the entire effect. Polentz drew both sides; Mint Medallic Artist John P. McGraw sculpted the sunflower obverse, and Eric David Custer sculpted the eagle reverse.