John McGraw

John P. McGraw did not set out to be a sculptor. He enrolled at Rutgers University–Camden as a business major, steered there by the people around him. The fit was awful. "For two years, I fought it tooth and nail," he later said. "It really wasn't who I was." He withdrew, took jobs in construction and at a bakery, and then went back to Rutgers — this time for the art he had wanted all along.

He earned his art degree in 1995. His first real work was the unglamorous, hands-on kind: a sculptor at Carolfi Studios in New Jersey, three blocks from the Philadelphia Mint, restoring and fabricating architectural ornament. The jobs ranged from a cathedral restoration at the City College of New York to a sixteen-foot seahorse for a casino. It taught him wood, clay, plaster, and mold-making — the physical craft of turning an idea into a solid object.

In 1998 he moved to Lenox, the American china and giftware house, where he stayed sixteen years. There he learned the discipline that would define his coin work: low relief — sculpting a design that reads as fully three-dimensional while rising only a fraction of a millimeter off a flat surface. It is exactly the problem a coin poses. Around 2000, Lenox introduced him to computer-controlled (CNC) sculpting, and he made a quiet bet on it. "I looked at it and thought," he recalled, "that technology is going to be my future."

McGraw joined the United States Mint in January 2014 as a product design specialist. In March 2020 he became one of the Mint's small bench of medallic artists — the sculptors who turn a flat drawing into the actual relief that gets struck into metal. By his own account, the Mint has only five of them, all working out of Philadelphia.

His signature is the modern medallic workflow. Where earlier Mint sculptors built a design in plaster by hand, McGraw works almost entirely as a digital sculptor — modeling the relief in software, then letting the Mint's machinery cut the master from his file. The instinct traces straight back to that bet at Lenox. The art is the same as it always was; only the tool changed.

His range is wide, and he is drawn to subjects most people have never heard of. He both designed and sculpted the Jovita Idar quarter — honoring the Mexican-American journalist and civil-rights organizer — and sculpted the Anna May Wong quarter, the first U.S. coin to feature an Asian American, struck by the hundreds of millions. He has worked on the Negro Leagues Baseball commemoratives and on Congressional Gold Medals, including those for Larry Doby, Anwar Sadat, and the U.S. Capitol Police. The appeal, he has said, is the research: "You come to understand what was going on in Negro League baseball, or learn about the power and energy of someone like Jovita Idar."

The American Liberty gold coin is the Mint's showcase. Launched in 2015 and issued every other year, each one is a one-ounce, .9999 fine ("four nines") 24-karat gold piece — a high relief coin, meaning the design rises unusually far off the flat field. Reaching that depth takes brute force: each coin is struck three times on the same planchet, the dies coming down at roughly 100 metric tons of pressure. The result is a $100 face value carried on a 30.61 mm disc with a reeded edge, every one bearing the W mint mark of West Point.

For the 2023 edition, McGraw both designed and sculpted the reverse — the tails side. He carved a young bald eagle perched on a rocky outcropping in the instant before it takes flight: liberty as something earned through perseverance, not handed over. (The obverse — the heads side — paired it with a bristlecone pine, among the oldest living things on Earth, sculpted by chief engraver Joe Menna from a design by Elana Hagler.)

Coins compete a year after they are struck. In the 2024 cycle of the international Coin of the Year program — run by World Coin News and judged across ten categories of coins dated 2023 — McGraw's coin first took the Best Gold Coin prize, then beat every other category winner for the overall title. It was named Coin of the Year at a ceremony on August 8, 2024, held alongside the American Numismatic Association's World's Fair of Money in Rosemont, Illinois. It is one of the most prestigious honors a mint can win, and McGraw's eagle was the design that carried it.

He returned to the series in 2025, this time sculpting the obverse: a sunflower and a bee, a small emblem of the stewardship liberty requires, from a design by Artistic Infusion Program artist Christopher Polentz.