Here is a thing most people never realize about a coin: the artist who draws it is usually not the one who carves it. A design might come from an outside artist, or from the Mint's Artistic Infusion Program — its stable of contract designers — as a flat sketch. A staff sculptor-engraver then translates that drawing into a three-dimensional model. The model becomes the die, the hardened steel stamp that strikes the coin. That translation — flat to round, paper to steel — was Nemeth's trade for most of his Mint career.
Look at the 2005 American Bison nickel, the year the buffalo briefly came home to the five-cent piece. The drawing was by Artistic Infusion artist Jamie Franki. The sculpture — the solid, muscular animal in profile, every contour reading at coin scale — is Nemeth's. Their initials sit on opposite sides of the ground beneath the bison: Franki's at the left, Nemeth's at the right. It is a perfect snapshot of how the modern Mint works — two names, two jobs, one coin. The coin was a hit; it took a Coin of the Year award for most popular world coin.
The same division of labor runs through his best-known circulating work. The 2007 Wyoming quarter — the bucking horse and rider, "The Equality State" — was designed by Donna Weaver and sculpted by Nemeth, his initials "NEN" tucked beside the horse. He could also carry someone else's grand idea into metal with real drama: for the 2005 Marine Corps silver dollar he modeled Joe Rosenthal's photograph of the flag-raising over Iwo Jima, the year and his initials hidden in the rock of Mount Suribachi. But the coin where Nemeth was both hands — designer and engraver — is the one people still carry without knowing his name.
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Nemeth's most enduring coin is also one of the quietest. In 2007, Congress passed the Native American $1 Coin Act, which ordered a new reverse every year on the Sacagawea dollar — each honoring a real contribution of Native peoples. The obverse stayed put: Glenna Goodacre's portrait of Sacagawea, the young Lemhi Shoshone woman who traveled with Lewis and Clark, her infant son on her back.
For the very first of these new reverses, in 2009, the Mint chose a design Nemeth both drew and carved — and it is striking how little it shouts. No chief, no eagle, no monument. Instead: a Native American woman bending to plant seeds in a field of corn, beans, and squash. This is the "Three Sisters," a planting method thousands of years old in which the three crops grow together so each helps the others — the cornstalk gives the beans a pole to climb, the beans feed nitrogen back into the soil, the squash spreads low and shades out weeds. The three together yield far more than any one grown alone. It is one of humanity's oldest and smartest pieces of farming, and Nemeth put it on a coin that still circulates today.
There is a second reason the 2009 dollar is a collector's favorite, and it has nothing to do with the picture. Beginning that year, the date and motto moved off the face of the coin and onto its edge — incused lettering you can feel with a fingernail. Collectors track the two positions in which that edge lettering can land, a small modern variety hiding on a coin most people never look at twice.