Don Everhart

Donald Nelson Everhart II was born in York, Pennsylvania, on August 19, 1949. He trained as a painter — a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Kutztown State University in 1972 — and came to coins almost by accident.

In 1973 he joined the Franklin Mint, the private outfit famous for collector medals and figurines. The sculptors there worked in bas-relief — the shallow, raised carving on the face of a coin or medal, where a whole image lives in a sliver of depth measured in fractions of a millimeter. He talked his way onto the sculpting staff and stayed until 1980, then quit to go freelance. That decision is the key to everything that followed.

For the next twenty-four years he was his own boss. He modeled giftware and figurines for Walt Disney, Tiffany, Lenox, and the Bradford Exchange; coins and medals for the British Royal Mint and the Royal Norwegian Mint; a life-size bronze bulldog — the school mascot — for Georgetown University. In 1997 President Clinton personally picked Everhart's portrait, over two other finalists' models, for his Second Inaugural Medal. This was an artist used to being chosen, not assigned.

So when the U.S. Mint hired him in 2004, the fit was rough. "I am a freelance artist at heart," he later told CoinWeek, "and the thought of an everyday nine-to-five job really didn't sit too well with me." His first year confirmed his fears: "I worked for about a year developing designs, none of which were chosen." A plant manager told him not to worry — the picks would come "in bunches." Everhart wasn't convinced. Two weeks later, he learned his Nevada State Quarter design had been chosen as the top pick. The dam broke. By the end he was asking, with obvious delight: "Who said I wouldn't enjoy working for the United States Mint?"

A coin is a sculpture you can lose in a couch cushion. That was the puzzle Everhart spent his career solving: how do you carve a soaring eagle or a president's face into a disc the thickness of a few sheets of paper, and still make it read at arm's length?

Before the Mint, his freelance work leaned hard into nature and motion — leaping dolphins, a chameleon, a hermit crab on the first non-round medal in a long-running garden-sculpture series. That looseness was rare in government work, and he knew it. "I don't normally get to do many things that are spontaneous and loose," he once said of his coin work, "as usually the designs are very precise and cleaned up." The tension between the wild medalist and the disciplined coin engraver runs through all of it.

That discipline came with a title that mattered: sculptor-engraver. On a modern coin there are two distinct jobs. A designer draws the image. A sculptor-engraver turns that drawing into the raised three-dimensional model the coin dies are cut from. Everhart did both on many coins; on others he sculpted a design someone else had drawn. Reading which credit is which is how you read a coin's authorship correctly — and Everhart's name lands in both columns across the catalog. He was promoted to the Mint's Lead Sculptor in 2014, and when he retired three years later he was the last member of the engraving staff to officially carry the sculptor-engraver title. The Mint has used outside artists and digital tools ever since.

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His most-seen work is one most people never look at twice. For the Presidential $1 Coin series, launched in 2007, Everhart designed and modeled the common reverse — the tails side — that appears on every coin in the program: a dramatic, low-angle view of the Statue of Liberty. Whether the obverse honored Washington or Nixon, the back was always his Liberty. He also designed or modeled fourteen of the series' obverse portraits, among them John Quincy Adams and James Madison.

The work fanned out from there. His designs appear on three State Quarters — Nevada, Hawaii, and New Mexico — and he sculpted three others (California, Montana, and Idaho) from other artists' drawings. He sculpted the obverse of the 2005 Jefferson nickel and designed the obverse portrait of the Benjamin Franklin "Founding Father" silver dollar, signature and all. For the First Spouse gold program — half-ounce, 24-karat (.9999 fine) coins with a $10 face value — he designed the Dolley Madison (2007) and Elizabeth Monroe (2008) portraits and modeled the recurring Martha Washington reverse. And as of May 2019, he had a hand in 37 Congressional Gold Medals, the nation's highest civilian honor, including those for the Dalai Lama, the Tuskegee Airmen, and Jackie Robinson.

In 2014 Everhart helped the U.S. Mint do something it had never done in more than two centuries: strike a coin that wasn't flat. The National Baseball Hall of Fame commemoratives — a clad half dollar, a silver dollar, and a $5 gold piece — were curved. The obverse is concave, shaped like the pocket of a fielder's glove (designed by competition winner Cassie McFarland); the reverse, a baseball, bulges outward to fit it. Everhart designed that baseball reverse and sculpted both sides, solving the engineering riddle of carving relief onto a surface that curls away from you. International judges named it 2016 Coin of the Year — the design world's top coin award. It remains one of the achievements he names with the most pride.

A year later he took on a different kind of challenge: pure interpretation. For the 2015 $100 American Liberty High Relief gold coin, the reverse — an American eagle rising in flight, a branch in its talons — was designed by artist Paul C. Balan. Everhart's job was to sculpt it, pushing the relief higher than ordinary coinage allows so the eagle seems to lift off the gold. It is a clean example of the second half of his craft: not the idea, but the hands that gave the idea depth.