Heidi Wastweet

Most coin designers come up through art schools and degrees. Heidi Wastweet came up through a factory floor.

She was born in Redwood City, California, in 1969 and raised in Idaho, with no formal art training. By her own account she taught herself — museums, books, time spent watching working artists. Then, in 1987, at eighteen, she went to work at the Sunshine Minting Company in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, and started learning the trade the hard way: by making things.

She learned it well. Over eleven years she rose to chief engraver — the person who turns a drawing into the steel die that actually strikes a coin. In 1998 she took the same role at the Global Mint in Las Vegas. In 2001 she opened her own studio, moving it from Idaho to Seattle in 2003 and to the San Francisco Bay in 2013.

By her own count she has produced more than a thousand coins, medals, and tokens since 1987 — most of them for private mints, long before her name appeared on anything from the United States Mint. That is the unusual shape of her career: decades of quiet, prolific craft first, official recognition second. The recognition did come. Her medals are held in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian, the British Museum, and the American Numismatic Society.

Wastweet works in bas-relief — sculpture that rises only slightly off a flat ground, the shallow art form a coin demands. The challenge is unforgiving: tell a clear, moving story inside a circle smaller than a postage stamp, in relief you could measure with a fingernail. Her answer is to design symbolically rather than literally — to find the single image that stands in for the whole idea.

You can see it in her U.S. coins. For the law-enforcement half dollar she didn't carve a police officer. She carved an eye, a magnifying glass, and a fingerprint — the patient, behind-the-scenes work of justice. The idea, not the illustration.

Her path into the U.S. Mint came in two steps, and they're worth keeping straight. First, service: from 2010 to 2018 she sat on the Citizens Coinage Advisory Committee — the CCAC, the panel that reviews proposed coin and medal designs for the Treasury — holding the seat reserved for a specialist in sculpture and medallic art. She also led the American Medallic Sculpture Association as its president. Then, in 2019, the Mint chose her for its Artistic Infusion Program: a roster of outside artists the Mint invites to submit designs alongside its own staff. In the Mint's words, the program exists "to enrich and invigorate the design of United States coins and medals by developing a pool of outside artists."

One detail trips up a lot of people. At the Mint, designing a coin and sculpting it are usually two separate jobs. Wastweet draws the design; a staff medallic artist sculpts the relief model from it. Her name is the designer's credit; theirs is the sculptor's. She is not, and never was, a U.S. Mint staff engraver — her engraving career was at private mints.

2021 National Law Enforcement Memorial half dollar. Her first design for a U.S. coin — the reverse (the "tails" side) of the copper-nickel half dollar. An eye behind a magnifying glass, poised over a fingerprint, beside the National Law Enforcement Museum emblem. It stands for the investigative, human side of policing rather than a portrait of an officer. It was sculpted by U.S. Mint medallic artist Renata Gordon.

2022 National Purple Heart Hall of Honor silver dollar. A year later she designed both sides of the silver dollar — a rarer credit. The obverse pairs the bust of George Washington with the Purple Heart medal (Washington created the original Badge of Military Merit, the award's ancestor) and five stars for the five military branches. The reverse shows a nurse in a World War I helmet bandaging a wounded service member on a stretcher. The coin is struck in .999 silver, 38.1 mm across. The obverse was sculpted by Eric D. Custer, the reverse by Craig A. Campbell.

2024 Greatest Generation $5 gold coin. For the program honoring the World War II generation, she designed the gold obverse: a section of the Wall of Stars at the National World War II Memorial, with an olive branch. Each star on that wall stands for 100 Americans who died in the war; the olive branch is the peace their sacrifice bought. It was sculpted by Eric David Custer, with a maximum mintage of 50,000.

For a collector, the names matter. On a modern U.S. commemorative, the designer and the named Mint sculptor are both part of the coin's provenance — and "designed both sides," as on the Purple Heart dollar, is a credit worth noting.