Eric David Custer

Reach into your change in 2026 and you may be holding Eric David Custer's work. The new dime struck for America's 250th birthday carries an eagle in mid-flight that he both designed and sculpted. That is rare. Most coins in your pocket were drawn by someone long dead; this one came from a working artist who can point at it and say, that's mine.

Custer did not arrive there by the usual art-school route. He grew up in Independence Township, in the rural western corner of Pennsylvania. Before the Mint, he painted automotive murals as a hobby — the airbrushed scenes that turn a car hood into a canvas — and did early engraving work at Wendell August Forge, a Pennsylvania metalware shop famous for its hand-hammered aluminum. He studied art at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania and earned a Bachelor of Science in industrial design from the Art Institute of Pittsburgh in 2006.

That mix is the whole story: fine-art instinct, hands-on metal craft, and the cold discipline of industrial design. It turns out to be exactly the toolkit a coin sculptor needs. "Designing and sculpting — they're both problem-solving processes as much as they are art," Custer has said.

He joined the U.S. Mint in 2008 — not as a designer of new coins, but as a product designer on the Design and Engraving team. That is the person who prepares and restores sculptures so they can actually be manufactured. He spent years adapting and building the Mint's digital-sculpting tools, learning the machine side of how a clay idea becomes millions of struck coins. In September 2021 he was promoted to medallic artist: one of the small handful of staff sculptors, based in Philadelphia, who model the coins and medals the country carries.

A coin is a brutally small stage. Relief — how far a design rises off the flat field of the coin — has to stay shallow, or the coins won't stack, won't strike cleanly, and won't survive a pocket. Custer's gift is making that thin layer feel deep.

How thin? By his own description, the sculpted image ends up about as thick as "two or three human hairs" stacked on top of each other. Into that sliver he has to land a believable, three-dimensional scene. The trick, in his telling, is a stack of "small technical nuances" that together create the illusion of depth — coaxing a flat, near-flat surface into reading as something alive.

Scale changes everything. Medals are larger, so they give an artist more room to breathe. A quarter or a dime is far harder: the same story has to fit a fraction of the space, under inscriptions and requirements set by law, on a calendar that can give an artist only about 16 business days to turn a line drawing into a finished sculpture. Custer works through it the way an industrial designer would — as a problem to be solved — then makes it sing like an artist.

His signature, across the work, is motion. Where another sculptor might pose a static figure, Custer catches the moment in mid-action. His Bessie Coleman tilts forward as if leaning into a headwind; his eagles are caught mid-stroke, wings swept, the composition pushing into the instant rather than sitting still. It is, unmistakably, the eye of someone who once learned to paint speed onto the side of a car.