David Parsons

David Goode Parsons was born in Gary, Indiana, on March 2, 1911. He studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and at the University of Wisconsin, and by the spring of 1936 he was still a student in Madison — young, talented, and unknown. That is the moment a coin found him.

Wisconsin was turning a hundred. To mark the centennial of the Wisconsin Territory, the state's celebration committee won approval for a commemorative half dollar — a special coin struck in real silver to honor an anniversary, sold to collectors rather than spent as everyday change. The committee wanted a local artist. In April 1936 they chose Parsons.

What's easy to miss is that the coin was the smallest thing he ever made. Parsons spent his working life building objects you could walk around. He kept a studio in Stoughton, Wisconsin, then moved to Texas and taught sculpture and life drawing at Rice University in Houston for decades, until he retired in 1981. A colleague there, Sandy Havens, remembered him simply as "a great teacher and a wonderful colleague." He died in Gualala, on the northern California coast, on February 5, 2005, at ninety-three. His papers are preserved at the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art.

The brief was specific. The committee wanted the Wisconsin territorial seal on one side and a badger — the state animal, and Wisconsin's old nickname — on the other. Parsons sculpted both.

The trouble was in the models — the large plaster versions an artist makes before a coin is machine-reduced to its tiny finished size. The U.S. Bureau of the Mint judged Parsons's models poorly executed and struck in too high a relief: the raised design stood up too far from the surface to strike cleanly or stack in a roll. In late May 1936, the Mint rejected them.

So the work changed hands. The Treasury sent the problem to the Commission of Fine Arts — the body that vets U.S. coin art — and on May 14 its chairman, Charles Moore, wrote to a New York sculptor named Benjamin Hawkins, enclosed a copy of the territorial seal, and told him the committee needed finished models in about three weeks. Hawkins delivered on June 3. The Commission approved his work two days later. The Medallic Art Company of New York cut his models down to coin-size hubs, and the Philadelphia Mint struck just 25,015 pieces in July 1936 — 15 of them set aside for the following year's Assay Commission.

Here is the honest part. Both Parsons and Hawkins are credited on the coin, but the numismatic historian Don Taxay argued the joint credit flattered the truth. Hawkins, he wrote, didn't work from Parsons's drawings at all — he went back to the territorial seal himself, and his badger was a completely different animal. Taxay's read was that centennial committees liked to attach their work to a hometown name, so the student's stayed on. You can see whose hand finished it: a small initial "H," for Hawkins, sits below the badger. Whatever the exact division of labor, this is the only national stage Parsons's design ever reached — even if another sculptor's chisel did the final cutting.

The coin itself is a quiet little history lesson. The obverse — the front, or heads side — shows a miner's bare forearm gripping a pickaxe over a mound of lead ore, an image taken from the territorial seal that recalls the 1820s lead mining that first drew settlers to the region. It carries the date July 4, 1836, when Governor Henry Dodge took office and the territory began. The reverse shows a badger standing on a log, with three arrows and an olive branch behind it — the arrows for the Black Hawk War between settlers and Native peoples, the olive branch for the peace that let the territory take hold.

Collectors never warmed to it. Q. David Bowers called it a coin that "was not a favorite with collectors," and the critics were harsher still: Taxay deemed it "one of our poorest issues," and the art historian Cornelius Vermeule likened it to "a box of baking soda" and "little more than a high school medal." A rough verdict — and a strange epitaph for the one coin Parsons's name is tied to.

If the half dollar is where the coin books leave Parsons, it sells the man short. His real life's work stood in the open air of a Houston campus.

At Rice, Parsons turned buildings into canvases. He designed the special bricks set into the exteriors of the Biology and Geology buildings, and hung huge mobile sculptures in their outdoor stairwells — pieces a hurricane later damaged so badly they had to come down. His signature work was String Quartet, a rotating sculpture built so the wind itself would turn it; a master plan for the campus once recommended siting it where its motion could be seen. He was the kind of teacher who held sculpture class under the track-stadium grandstand before a proper building existed, rain or shine, and who built horse heads and hooves for a student production of Equus. He kept a studio at his home in Bellaire, where, by one account, he played classical music out into an overgrown garden on weekends.

His work reaches back to Wisconsin, too — he cast a bronze tablet to General Baron von Steuben for a Milwaukee junior high school, and a pair of his bronzes still stand there. (In a small coincidence, Benjamin Hawkins, the man who finished his coin, also left a sculpture in Milwaukee — at the city's War Memorial.) Parsons designed the 1968 Houston Distinguished Visitors Medal, fitting for a Rice professor, and appeared in editions of Who's Who in American Art from 1937 into the 1950s. But it is the Wisconsin half dollar, and the tangle behind it, that keeps his name in the coin catalogs.