Miley Busiek and the Family of Eagles

In 1980, a sculptor from Texas listened to Ronald Reagan accept the Republican nomination under the theme "Together — A New Beginning." Most people heard a campaign slogan. Miley Busiek saw a sculpture.

She decided the right symbol for that idea was not the usual lone bald eagle — the standard American shorthand for power — but a family of eagles. A male eagle carrying an olive branch, flying home to a nest where a female waits with their young. Strength, but pointed at the next generation. She sketched it, then sculpted it.

That sculpture had a life before any coin. The Republican National Committee chose it as the commemorative for Reagan's 1981 inauguration — the same week the 52 Americans held hostage in Iran for 444 days finally came home. Small bronze versions were given out as inaugural gifts.

Here is the part that makes Busiek almost unique among coin designers: she did not yet have a coin to put her eagles on. She had a design and a conviction. When she learned the Treasury was weighing a new gold bullion coin, she set out to land the reverse — the "tails" side — before the coin existed. She was told the design would need approval from Congress, not the Treasury alone. So she went to Congress.

A largely self-taught artist with no Mint contract made trips to Washington, presented her sculpture to lawmakers, and gathered letters of support — including from two of the era's most famous football coaches, Dallas's Tom Landry and Washington's Joe Gibbs. The campaign paid off in a way few designers ever achieve. When the Gold Bullion Coin Act of 1985 became law on December 17, 1985, the statute itself spelled out the reverse: "a design representing a family of eagles, with the male carrying an olive branch and flying above a nest containing a female eagle and hatchlings." That is Busiek's design, written into the United States Code. Her name is not in the law. The picture is.

Busiek grew up in Beaumont, Texas, and her path to a national coin was anything but conventional. By her own account she had almost no formal art training — a single evening art class at a community school in Dallas after high school, and that was about it. There was no fine-arts degree, no apprenticeship under a master, no Mint pedigree. That makes the rest of the story even more striking: a self-taught sculptor argued her own work onto American currency.

She built a career as a monumental sculptor — work measured in plazas and building entrances, in bronze, steel, and cast stone. She produced art in Dallas from the late 1970s before moving to the Washington, D.C. area in the mid-1990s to keep working there. Her subjects run patriotic and classical: faith, family, country, the heroic.

Her public commissions outscale the coin many times over. They include Peace Through Strength, a bronze monument in Arlington, Virginia; the Seal of the President rendered in stainless steel; and a set of mustangs on the campus of Southern Methodist University in Dallas. Her work has been held in collections including the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, and the University of Texas at Austin. And yet the small eagles on the gold coin are, by a wide margin, the most reproduced thing she ever made — millions of times over, in fine gold.

A coin design and a coin die are not the same thing. A design is the picture; a die is the hardened steel stamp that presses that picture into metal under tons of pressure. Translating one into the other — deciding how high the relief stands, how light catches a feather, what survives at the size of a fingernail — is its own craft, and it is usually done by a Mint engraver, not the original artist.

Busiek's monumental instinct shows in how the reverse reads. The composition works like a small relief sculpture: the male eagle's wings fill the upper field, the nest anchors the bottom, and the eye travels along the olive branch from one bird to the others. It tells a whole story in a circle barely larger than a thumbnail.

On the finished coin her concept shares the surface with two other hands. The Family of Eagles was sculpted for coinage by U.S. Mint sculptor-engraver Sherl Joseph Winter, and both artists are credited in miniature — a tiny MB for Busiek and JW for Winter sit on the reverse. The other side of the coin belongs to an earlier master entirely: the obverse — the "heads" side — is Augustus Saint-Gaudens' striding Liberty, lifted from his celebrated 1907 double eagle, often called the most beautiful coin the United States ever struck. So the Gold Eagle pairs a turn-of-the-century legend with a living sculptor who fought her way onto the same coin.

From the first coins in 1986 through the middle of 2021, the Family of Eagles was the reverse of the American Gold Eagle. Collectors now call it the "Type 1" reverse, to set it apart from what came next.

In 2021 the Mint replaced it for the coin's 35th anniversary. The new reverse is a tight close-up of a bald eagle's head, designed by Jennie Norris and sculpted by Renata Gordon. Busiek — by then working under the name Miley Tucker-Frost — did not stay quiet about losing the design she had campaigned for. While the redesign was being weighed, she pushed back on the premise that a recognizable, working coin needed changing at all.

"I feel like the design carries a purpose — signaling hope for the future generation and how important they are. If a design is OK, there's no need to change. There are plenty of coins to change the designs on."

— Miley Busiek Frost, to Coin World, 2019

She even offered a compromise: if the Mint's real worry was counterfeiting, it could add anti-counterfeiting features to the existing coins rather than scrap the art. The Mint went its own way. But for a generation of buyers, "the gold eagle" still means her eagles.