Jamie Franki

Jamie Franki was not a Mint engraver. He was an illustration professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte — a working artist with a master's degree from Syracuse University, earned in 1988, who taught students how pictures carry meaning. He drew. He sculpted. And by his own account, he cared most about commemoration: objects that carry an idea forward through time.

Then the Mint came looking for people exactly like him. In 2003 it launched the Artistic Infusion Program — a stable of working illustrators and sculptors invited to submit designs alongside the Mint's own staff engravers, to push fresh blood into American coinage after decades of in-house work. On February 24, 2004, Franki was formally appointed a Master Designer in that program. Within two years, his art was in every cash register in the country.

His timing was extraordinary. Congress had just ordered the nickel reimagined. The Westward Journey Nickel Series (2004–2005) marked the bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark Expedition with a run of temporary designs — and the law that authorized it required the familiar Monticello to return in 2006. So there was a brief, once-in-a-lifetime opening for new art on America's smallest-value workhorse coin. Franki walked through it not once but twice.

His first hit was the American Bison — the buffalo. For the first half of 2005, Franki's design filled the reverse — the tails side — of the nickel: a heavy, grazing bison rendered as a deliberate salute to James Earle Fraser's beloved 1913 Buffalo nickel. (Collectors love to say Fraser's original animal was modeled on "Black Diamond," a bison at the Bronx Zoo — a charming story that gets repeated endlessly and has never been firmly proven.) Franki drew it; Mint engraver Norman E. Nemeth sculpted it into steel. The public adored the result: it won the international Coin of the Year award as the world's most popular coin of 2005.

But his signature achievement came next, and it was a quiet act of nerve. For the 2006 obverse — the heads side — Franki did something no one had done on a circulating American coin: he turned the president to face the viewer head-on. Working from a 1800 study of Jefferson by the painter Rembrandt Peale — made the year Jefferson was elected — he drew a confident, forward-gazing Jefferson, eyes meeting yours across the metal. No periwig; his natural hair. It ended a 68-year run of Felix Schlag's profile and became the first U.S. circulating coin to show a president looking straight ahead.

That is the heart of Franki's craft: he is a portraitist who thinks like a storyteller. The 2006 nickel doesn't merely show Jefferson's likeness — it stages a gaze. And he wove in one more intimate touch. The word "Liberty" on the coin is set in Jefferson's own handwriting, taken from his handwritten draft of the Declaration of Independence. A federal coin, signed in the hand of the man who wrote that liberty was self-evident. Mint engraver Donna Weaver sculpted the portrait, and it still rides on the nickel in your pocket today.

Designers and sculptors have always hidden their signatures on coins, and the 2006 nickel carries two. Franki's initials — JNF — sit at the top of Jefferson's right lapel. Weaver's are tucked on the jacket just above the rim, at the 6 o'clock position. Two artists, two marks, one coin: the illustrator who imagined the gaze, and the engraver who cut it into a die hard enough to strike a billion times. It's worth a loupe the next time a 2006-or-later nickel lands in your change.

Franki never stopped at the nickel. In 2008 the U.S. Olympic Committee chose his design for the Order of Ikkos — the medallion a U.S. Olympic or Paralympic medalist gives to the coach who got them there. (The award is named for Ikkos of Tarentum, an ancient Greek athlete remembered as one of history's first coaches.) That same year, when the American Numismatic Association brought its convention to Baltimore, Franki designed its medal honoring Baltimore's own Edgar Allan Poe. He has cut a long run of ANA convention medals — Charlotte, Boston, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia — and even a medal marking the millennium of the Jewish community of Kaifeng, China. Different subjects, same instinct: a small metal object that holds a big idea still.