Michael Gaudioso: the sculptor who made other artists' drawings real

There are two jobs hiding inside almost every modern U.S. coin. One person draws the picture. A second person decides how that picture lives in metal — how high the relief stands (the relief is how far the design rises off the flat surface), how the surfaces catch light, what gets sharpened and what gets softened so the design survives being hammered into a disc a few millimeters thick. Michael Gaudioso spent eleven years doing the second job, and his name is on roughly fifty coins and medals because of it.

He did not set out to make coins. Gaudioso earned his undergraduate degree at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and a Master of Fine Arts from the New York Academy's graduate school of figurative art in New York City. In between, from 1995 to 1999, he studied sculpture in St. Petersburg, Russia, at the Repin Institute — the descendant of the old imperial academy of arts. That is draw-the-figure-from-life training, the kind that teaches a sculptor to read anatomy and light long before touching clay.

Before the Mint, he earned his living in an unexpected medium: stained glass. Gaudioso worked as a master painter and designer for Willet Hauser, one of the oldest stained-glass studios in the country. It is a craft about light, color, and designing for a fixed surface — useful instincts for a man who would later spend his days deciding how a coin should catch the sun. He also taught figure drawing at Villanova University.

He joined the United States Mint's sculpting-and-engraving staff in Philadelphia in 2009 and retired in late September 2020, after about eleven years. In that span the Mint credits him with sculpting on the order of fifty coins and medals — and on a handful of those, he was the artist who both drew the design and cut it.

Here is the part most people get wrong about a modern coin. The "designer" credited on it is often an artist from the Mint's Artistic Infusion Program — an outside artist who submits a drawing. The "sculptor-engraver" is the Mint staffer who turns that drawing into a three-dimensional model that can actually be struck. Gaudioso was usually the second name. That is not the lesser role; it is the one that decides whether a beautiful drawing becomes a beautiful coin or a muddy one.

He worked the traditional way — in clay — with one clever trick of his own. A 2013 visit to the Philadelphia engraving studio caught his method: he taped a transparent sheet bearing a tracing of the artist's sketch over the top of his clay basin, then flipped it up and down as he worked, checking the rising relief against the flat drawing again and again. It was how he translated a two-dimensional sketch into a three-dimensional surface — and it is how he built the obverse — the heads side — of his Code Talkers Congressional Gold Medal. (By the time Gaudioso arrived, the Mint had also moved to digital sculpting on a stylus and screen; he is remembered as one of the staff who kept the older clay craft alive alongside it.)

You can find his mark if you know where to look. A sculptor-engraver tucks tiny initials into the design — Gaudioso's read "MG." On the 2017 American Liberty gold coin, his "MG" sits between the tips of the eagle's left wing and the "S" in "100 DOLLARS." It is the quiet signature of the person who decided how that eagle would fly in metal.

His most widely seen work came at the very end of his career and just after it. In 2021 the Mint changed the reverse — the tails side — of the American Silver Eagle for the first time since the coin's 1986 debut, retiring John Mercanti's heraldic eagle after a 35-year run. The new design, by Emily Damstra, shows a single bald eagle coming in to land, an oak branch in its grip as if to add it to a nest. Gaudioso was the sculptor who brought that bird into relief. When the grading service NGC wanted a hand to sign certified examples, they struck an exclusive deal for his signature at the start of 2021 — pairing him with Mercanti, the man whose eagle his had replaced.

The one that was all his — Jim Thorpe <!-- kind: prose; anchor: jim-thorpe -->

On most coins Gaudioso translated someone else's idea. On the 2018 Native American dollar, the idea was his too. He both designed and sculpted the reverse honoring Jim Thorpe — the Sac and Fox athlete widely called one of the greatest all-around competitors of the 20th century, winner of the pentathlon and decathlon golds at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics. Gaudioso's design is busy with motion: Thorpe's portrait, Thorpe carrying a football, Thorpe leaping a hurdle. It is a rare full-credit work for a Mint sculptor, and a reminder that the man translating other artists' drawings could draw a fine one of his own.