Joseph Menna

In 2005 the United States Mint hired a sculptor who built his figures inside a computer.

That was new. For more than two centuries, every U.S. coin began the same way: an artist pressed thumbs into clay or wax, shaped a portrait several inches across, then a machine slowly traced that big model down to coin size. Joseph Menna could do all of that the old way. But he could also do something almost no one at the Mint could — sculpt the same form on a screen, turning it in three dimensions with the precision of software. He was the first full-time digitally skilled artist the Mint ever brought on. The way of working he introduced is now the house standard.

Menna was born in March 1970 and raised in the Blackwood section of Gloucester Township, New Jersey, where he went to Highland Regional High School. He earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia in 1992, then a master's from the New York Academy of Art in 1994 — schools built on rigorous, old-fashioned training in drawing and sculpting the human figure. He kept going: the Art Students League of New York, and study in Russia at the Saint Petersburg Stieglitz State Academy of Art and Design. He trained alongside Michael Gaudioso, a future Mint colleague, in both the United States and Russia — the two have known each other more than thirty years.

Then comes the twist that makes Menna interesting. That classically trained sculptor spent the better part of two decades as one of the busiest digital artists in the collectibles business — building action figures and statues for clients including DC Comics, Hasbro, and Fisher-Price, using the sculpting software ZBrush. (His digital work even reached the concept stage of the Statue of Unity in India, today the tallest statue in the world.) He grew up on comic books, and he poured that pop-culture fluency into the same hands that had learned anatomy the hard way. When the Mint needed someone who could bridge clay and code, there were very few people on Earth more qualified.

Menna's signature is that he never treated digital sculpting as a shortcut. He treated it as another chisel.

His classical training, he has said, made the move to digital sculpture relatively easy — because the hard part was never the tool. The hard part is knowing how light will fall across a cheek, how deep a fold of cloth should cut, how a portrait should sit so it still reads at the size of a fingernail. A relief — the raised, sculpted surface of a coin — is really a drawing made out of shadow. Get the depths wrong and the face goes flat or muddy once it's struck into metal. Menna's gift is carrying that judgment, learned in clay, into a medium where the "clay" is virtual.

That fluency is why the work has range. He sculpted the reverse — the tails side — of the everyday Lincoln cent now in your pocket. He has also sculpted the soaring high relief gold coins that are among the most ambitious objects the Mint makes. High relief means the design rises far off the surface; it takes more pressure, more strikes, and more care than an ordinary coin, and it is the closest modern minting comes to a medal you could lose a fingertip in. Translating another artist's flat drawing into that kind of strikeable, dimensional form is exactly the problem Menna built a career solving.

His old boss put it memorably. John Mercanti — the Mint's 12th Chief Engraver, who retired at the end of 2010 — called Menna the "Yoda of digital sculpting" and said his command of digital programs was essential to moving the Mint forward. The chair Mercanti left sat empty for more than eight years. In February 2019, Mint Director David J. Ryder named Menna the 13th Chief Engraver of the United States Mint — the artistic head of the institution, directing its sculptor-engravers and the outside artists of the Artistic Infusion Program. Menna's reaction was plain: "It's only been a week and it fits like a glove."