Frank Morris

Frank Morris built one career, watched the world erase it, and built two more out of the wreckage.

He grew up in Memphis, Tennessee, and decided in the first grade that he would be an artist. The hook set early: a boy's visit to the Brooks Museum to see an exhibition of Time magazine covers convinced him he wanted to make pictures that ran in print. He trained young in the atelier of the painter Paul Penczner, earned a fine-arts degree with honors from the University of Memphis, and went to New York to chase the work — famously cold-calling big magazines from payphones to pitch himself.

It worked. Morris became a sought-after illustrator. His paintings ran in Newsweek and New York Magazine, where editors handed him the famous to paint — Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, First Ladies Nancy Reagan and Rosalynn Carter, the Shah of Iran. He painted covers for the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew series, made the art for the very first cover of Memphis magazine under art director Fred Woodward, and drew the logo for the city's Playhouse on the Square.

Then the ground gave way. As desktop computers swallowed commercial illustration through the 1990s and 2000s, the assignments dried up. Morris did the harder thing: he went back to school. He studied at the New York Academy of Art and the Art Students League, sat in on medical dissections to learn the skeleton and muscle under a face, and remade himself as a portrait painter — the kind whose work hangs in courthouses and city halls. He has said his favorite painting is the one of his own father, a man caught in "a quiet moment of solitude." That instinct — to find the small human moment and hold it still — is exactly what would make his coins work.

Morris is not a staff engraver at the U.S. Mint. He belongs to its Artistic Infusion Program — a roster of outside artists the Mint invites in to design coins and medals, while its own sculptor-engravers turn those drawings into the three-dimensional models that become dies (the hardened steel stamps that strike each coin). On a finished coin Morris is the designer; another artist is the sculptor, and the initials of both appear on the metal. The Mint calls him an Artistic Infusion Program artist; his own materials sometimes use the grander phrase "Master Designer for the U.S. Mint."

He won his place the hard way — through the Mint's competitive open call for artists — and the work reversed nothing about who he was. A portrait on canvas can be any size and any depth; a coin is the width of a button and nearly flat. Morris had to learn to say a great deal in low relief, the shallow raised modeling a coin allows, and to trust a sculptor to carry his intent into steel. He has named the appeal plainly: the work fuses his two loves, history and art, and it rewards the deep research a true-to-life portrait of a person or an event demands.

His first commission was a serious one. He designed three of the Code Talkers Recognition Congressional Gold Medals, honoring the Native American servicemen who used their tribal languages as unbreakable battlefield code in the World Wars. The full series of medals — one per honored tribe — was celebrated at a ceremony in Emancipation Hall at the U.S. Capitol on November 20, 2013.

From medals, Morris moved to money — and his coin work spans circulating quarters, gold collector coins, and modern commemoratives.

Twice he designed the reverse — the "tails" side — of an America the Beautiful quarter, the 56-coin national-parks series. The 2015 Blue Ridge Parkway quarter (for North Carolina) shows a road curling along a mountainside toward a tunnel, with a flowering dogwood in the foreground; it was sculpted by Joseph Menna. The 2017 George Rogers Clark quarter — the last release of that year — depicts Clark wading his men through flooded plains toward Fort Sackville, sculpted by Michael Gaudioso.

He also designed three of the Mint's First Spouse $10 gold coins, each a portrait of a president's wife. For Caroline Harrison (2012) and Ellen Wilson (2013) he designed the obverse — the "heads" side, the portrait itself. For Grace Coolidge (2014) he designed the reverse, and it is pure Morris: three hands finger-spelling the letters U-S-A in American Sign Language against the White House, a nod to the deaf students Coolidge championed.

Then came the commemoratives, the modern silver-and-gold coins Congress authorizes to mark an anniversary or a cause. He designed the reverse of the 2015 U.S. Marshals Service 225th Anniversary silver dollar — a frontier marshal leaning on a post, a "WANTED IN FT. SMITH" poster in hand, a whole Western in one quiet pose (sculpted by Joseph Menna). And in his most prominent commission, the 2021 National Law Enforcement Memorial and Museum program, he designed the obverse of both the gold and silver coins. The $5 gold shows two officers, a man and a woman, in profile and saluting. The silver dollar shows an officer kneeling beside a child who is reading a book while perched on a basketball — a single tender moment standing in for a much larger idea. Both were sculpted by Phebe Hemphill.