Matt Swaim

Most coin designers come up through sculpture or engraving. Matt Swaim came up drawing buildings that did not exist yet.

He is an architectural illustrator — the artist an architect hires to paint a finished tower, museum, or stadium before a single beam is set. It is exacting work. Light, perspective, and material all have to read as true, or the client won't believe the building. Swaim has done it for more than twenty years from his Jacksonville, Florida studio, Studio Swaim, turning out, by his own count, well over a thousand renderings for clients across the United States and abroad. He learned the trade the long way: eight years working under the Jacksonville renderer Robert C. Winters before going out on his own.

He trained for it formally, too — a Bachelor of Fine Arts in illustration from the Savannah College of Art and Design and a Master of Fine Arts in visual art from Jacksonville University. His peers noticed the results. The American Society of Architectural Illustrators has handed him its internationally juried Award of Excellence four times, and he has won Jacksonville's AIA Lynda Mack award.

In 2019 the U.S. Mint invited him into its Artistic Infusion Program — the standing pool of outside artists the Mint pulls in to design national coins and medals. It is a sharp turn for a career and barely a turn at all: the discipline that makes a rendering convincing is the same discipline a coin needs in a space the size of a thumbnail.

A coin is the hardest illustration assignment there is. You get a circle smaller than a poker chip, no color, and one shot at the light. The relief — the raised and lowered metal that catches a lamp — has to do everything that color and shading do on paper. The Artistic Infusion Program (AIP) exists to bring fresh eyes to that problem. AIP artists submit designs; the Mint's own staff sculptors then translate those drawings into the three-dimensional models the dies are cut from. So almost every Swaim coin is two hands — his drawing, a Mint sculptor's relief.

His instincts as a renderer show up in what he draws. The Negro Leagues silver dollar is built on a single arrested moment: a pitcher caught at the top of his windup, the ball pushed toward the viewer so it looms larger than the man. That is the frozen, believable instant an architectural illustrator chases for a living — the picture that makes you feel the next half-second.

What's striking is the range. In a few short years his designs have landed on a circulating dollar, a commemorative half dollar, a commemorative silver dollar, and a Congressional Gold Medal — a warship, a bridge-tunnel, a Tennessee farm, the World War II Memorial, a baseball player. Five very different objects, four different scales, each with its own rules, all drawn by the same hand.

The Negro Leagues Baseball silver dollar (2022) is the one collectors know him for. It marks the centennial of the Negro National League — the league Black players built in 1920 after being shut out of the white major leagues. Swaim designed the obverse, the heads side: a pitcher in mid-throw, the baseball in the foreground, a border of baseball stitching running the rim. Mint medallic artist Eric David Custer sculpted it. Look closely and there's a small flourish — a "100" privy mark (a tiny extra stamp) tucked beneath the pitcher's raised knee, the zero stylized into the shape of a ballfield.

The USS Indianapolis Congressional Gold Medal (2020) is his most solemn work. The medal honors the crew of the cruiser sunk in the final days of World War II, after it had delivered atomic-bomb components to Tinian. Swaim drew the obverse — the ship riding above an arc of its ten battle stars, ringed by a border of rivets carrying the inscriptions USS INDIANAPOLIS CA-35 and the dates 1932–1945. Mint medallic artist Jay Kushwara sculpted it.

Two American Innovation dollars — the golden circulating series honoring one invention or breakthrough per state — carry his work on the reverse (the tails side). For Virginia (2021) he rendered a cutaway view of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, slicing the structure open so you can see the engineering inside; John P. McGraw sculpted it. For Tennessee (2022) he drew a farm with new power lines marching down the road — a quiet nod to the Tennessee Valley Authority that brought electricity to the rural South. Mint chief engraver Joseph F. Menna sculpted that one.

The Greatest Generation half dollar (2024) rounds out the set. Swaim's reverse shows the World War II Memorial in Washington from the point of view of someone walking up the ramp toward one of its towers — a low, human angle that puts you inside the monument rather than across the plaza from it. John P. McGraw sculpted it.