Jim Licaretz

In 1989, Jim Licaretz quit one of the most prestigious sculpting jobs in America — a staff post at the U.S. Mint — to go make toys. Seventeen years later he came back, and helped redesign the most familiar coin in the country.

That round trip is the key to him. Most Mint engravers are coin people for life. Licaretz is a sculptor first — born in Philadelphia on September 9, 1949, and trained in the old, hands-in-the-clay tradition at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he won the Edmond Stewardson prize for figure modeling and a traveling scholarship. To him a penny and a museum bronze are the same puzzle: how to make a face or a building live in shallow relief, where you have a fraction of a millimeter of depth to work with.

He first joined the Mint in 1986. He left in 1989 for private industry — the Franklin Mint, and then a job as a master sculptor at the toymaker Mattel — before returning to the Philadelphia engraving staff in 2006. He stayed a decade and retired at the end of 2016. The work from that second tour is what most Americans hold without knowing it: his initials sit on circulating quarters, Presidential dollars, gold First Spouse coins, commemoratives, congressional medals — and the 2009 Lincoln cent.

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There is a small, telling detail in Licaretz's two Mint stints. The first time, in the 1980s, his title was sculptor-engraver — the Mint's century-old name for the artist who both models a coin and engraves the master tools. When he came back in 2006, the title on his desk was medallic sculptor.

That swap was not about him. The Mint had quietly stopped minting sculptor-engravers. The last person to hold the old title, Don Everhart, retired in mid-2017, a few months after Licaretz; newer hires arrived as "medallic sculptors" or "medallic artists." A hiring freeze left the engraving staff down to a handful. So Licaretz sits right at the hinge of a tradition — one of the last artists trained in the era of the named, lifelong Mint engraver, doing the job into the years when the job's old name was being retired around him.

It helps explain why he treats coins as sculpture, not as a trade apart. The detour into toys was not a break from his craft. A toy line needs exactly what a portrait coin needs: a sculptor who can make a face read at small scale, and who knows what survives when a shape is shrunk and reproduced a million times.

To read a coin's credits you need two words. The designer draws the image. The sculptor-engraver — or medallic sculptor — turns that drawing into a three-dimensional model the Mint can cut into a die, the hardened steel stamp that strikes the coin. Licaretz spent his Mint career on the second job: taking another artist's flat sketch and giving it depth, weight, and the right relief — how far the design rises off the field, the blank background of the coin.

His most-seen work is the 2009 Lincoln cent's first reverse — the "tails" side showing the Kentucky log cabin where Lincoln was born. The drawing was by Richard Masters of the Mint's Artistic Infusion Program, the outside-artist pool the Mint draws on for fresh ideas. Licaretz did the sculpting: turning a clean line drawing of a one-room cabin into a model that would still read as a cabin after being shrunk to penny size and struck billions of times in soft copper-plated zinc. Look at the lower edge of the cabin scene and you'll find both their initials — RM for Masters, JL for Licaretz. Two names, two crafts, one coin.

That is harder than it sounds. Detail that looks crisp at model scale turns to mush at coin scale; the sculptor has to know in advance what will survive the squeeze. The same discipline runs across his catalogue. He sculpted the reverse of the 2008 Bald Eagle commemorative silver dollar — a faithful rendering of the first Great Seal of the United States. He modeled the obverse — the "heads" side — of the Andrew Jackson Presidential dollar, America the Beautiful quarters including Homestead National Monument in Nebraska and Shawnee National Forest in Illinois, and First Spouse gold coins. Numista lists roughly four dozen coins and medals to his name.

Since retiring he has stayed in the studio, and his medal work has only sharpened. In 2023 the American Medallic Sculptors Association — which he once led as president — gave its American Medal of the Year to his portrait medal of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, made in 2022 in the months after Russia's invasion. He builds these the modern way: a 3-D-printed original, cast in bonded bronze, then finished by hand with a wax patina. The Zelensky medal is large — about three and a half inches across, limited to 199 pieces — and was sold to raise money for Ukrainian relief.