LeRoy Transfield

When the United States Mint went looking for an artist to mark one hundred years since America entered the First World War, the winner turned out to be someone with the war already in his blood.

LeRoy Transfield was born in New Zealand around 1965, of Māori and European descent. By his own telling, the subject found him early: "Ever since I was very little I was fascinated by war and war stories." That was not idle curiosity. On his mother's side, two of his relatives served in the First World War with the New Zealand Expeditionary Force's Native Contingent — among them his grandmother's brother, Huriwhenua Taiaroa, and her cousin, Te Oti Taiaroa. (Popular accounts often call their unit the "Māori Battalion," but that famous name belonged to a different generation — the 28th Māori Battalion of the Second World War. The First World War Māori served in the Native Contingent and, from 1916, the New Zealand (Māori) Pioneer Battalion.)

He came to sculpture as a teenager in New Zealand, then crossed the Pacific to study it. He took a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Brigham Young University–Hawaii in 1993, working under the sculptor Jan Fisher (1938–2016). He tried for a graduate degree, was turned down, and did the more stubborn thing instead — he opened his own studio. Today he lives and works in Orem, Utah, where for years his workshop was simply the garage.

Transfield is a figurative sculptor — he makes people, in the round, in bronze and stone. The phrase he uses for the work is to "take an idea or a feeling and give it form and space." That instinct for the human figure is why a coin commission ever came his way: the Mint wanted designs that would read as sculpture, not illustration, and that is the only way he knows how to think.

His résumé is built from things meant to stand in public and last. He has made war memorials and monuments for towns across Utah, civic and private commissions, and a strain of religious work — a bust of the Latter-day Saint apostle Matthew Cowley in Hamilton, New Zealand, and a relief of Christ and the apostles over the entrance of the Newport Beach California Temple. Recognition followed: he is reported to have won a "National Sculptor of the Year" honor in 2001, and the National Sculpture Society — the century-old American body for the art — counts him a Fellow (FNSS) and awarded his Sea Nymph the $1,000 Marion and Gilbert Roller Memorial Prize at its 89th Annual Awards Exhibition.

What he had not done was design a coin. "I had done very few low-relief sculptures and no coins," he admitted. Low relief — a design that rises only a fraction of a millimeter off a flat field — is its own discipline, closer to drawing with shadow than to carving. That he won anyway, on his first attempt, is the part collectors find remarkable.

In 2016 Congress authorized a silver dollar for the centennial of the First World War, and the Mint did something unusual: it ran an open, two-phase public competition for the design. Anyone could enter the first round. The Mint then invited up to twenty artists into a second phase to submit sculpted plaster models. A jury — three members each from the Commission of Fine Arts and the Citizens Coinage Advisory Committee — weighed the field, and the Secretary of the Treasury made the final call. Transfield's designs were chosen for both sides of the coin, and Mint officials' vote for his obverse was unanimous. The winners were unveiled in Washington on October 9, 2017.

The obverse — the heads side — is "Soldier's Charge." A soldier in an M-1917 steel helmet pushes forward in profile, rifle gripped, barbed wire raking across the lower field. Transfield gave him a crooked nose and a face cut almost from stone, on purpose: the figure is meant to read less like a portrait and more like a monument to every soldier at once. The reverse — the tails side — is "Poppies in the Wire," poppy blossoms tangled in barbed wire. Both elements are exact to the war: wire strung between trenches to stop an advance, and the poppy that became the flower of remembrance after it grew over the churned fields of Flanders. The flower of memory rises straight out of the thing that did the killing.

Getting to the poppies took a string of dead ends. He first tried a diving eagle for the reverse, then a homing pigeon — a real fixture of trench communication — and sculpted it, and hated it. "I just knew it would look good. But when I fleshed it out it looked terrible! I couldn't send it!" The answer arrived away from the studio, on a bike ride with his daughter near a bridge: poppies and wire. He submitted on the final day of the deadline.

Like every U.S. commemorative, the coin needed a Mint sculptor to turn the artist's design into the finished, three-dimensional relief the dies are cut from. That work fell to Don Everhart, the Philadelphia Mint's lead sculptor-engraver — and it was among his last assignments before he retired in 2017, after more than a decade on the staff. So the silver dollar carries two hands: the New Zealander who imagined it, and the Mint veteran who gave it depth.