Phebe Hemphill: the hand that shapes Liberty

Phebe Hemphill grew up surrounded by small bronze faces. Her father collected Franklin Mint coins. Her grandfather, Gibbons Gray Cornwell Jr., collected medals and made bas-relief sculpture — art that rises just slightly off a flat surface, the way a face lifts off a coin. As a child she wanted to be an architect, but she was already shaping small figures out of old telephone wire. "My grandfather was a big influence on me," she told CoinWeek. "When I was young, he was collecting medals and was practicing bas-relief sculpture."

That family line runs deeper than a hobby. Hemphill is descended from Martha Jackson Cornwell, a great-great aunt who studied under Augustus Saint-Gaudens — the sculptor whose 1907 double eagle is still widely called the most beautiful coin America ever made. "I have a deep connection to the Saint-Gaudens tradition through a great-great aunt, who was a student of Saint-Gaudens in the 1890s at the Art Students League," Hemphill has said. It is a rare thing for a working coin artist to trace a direct line back to the master who set the standard for the whole field.

Born April 25, 1960, in West Chester, Pennsylvania, she trained as a fine artist at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, graduating in 1987, and studied for three years under the Philadelphia sculptor Evangelos Frudakis. But she did not walk straight into the U.S. Mint. The path took a long, unglamorous detour — and that detour is part of what made her good.

The road to the Mint <!-- kind: prose; anchor: career-path -->

Out of art school, Hemphill joined the Franklin Mint — the private mint famous for collectible medals and porcelain — and stayed fifteen years, from 1987 to 2002. She worked in the sculpture department on porcelain and medallic art, learning the unforgiving discipline of low relief: how to suggest a whole human form in a sliver of depth, where every fraction of a millimeter reads on the finished piece. The work earned her real recognition — the National Sculpture Society's Alex J. Ettel Grant in 2000, and the Franklin Mint's own Renaissance Sculpture Award in 2001.

Then came the swerve. From 2002 to 2005 she worked as a staff sculptor at McFarlane Toys in Bloomingdale, New Jersey, the company behind hyper-detailed action figures. It sounds like a world away from a national mint — and it was — but sculpting toys is a master class in reading a form in the round, catching a likeness, and pushing fine detail to its limit. In 2006 she brought all of it to the United States Mint in Philadelphia, joining the small in-house team of sculptor-engravers who turn artists' drawings into the metal in your hand.

To understand what Hemphill actually does, you have to know how a modern U.S. coin gets made. Most designs start as a flat drawing — often by an artist in the Mint's Artistic Infusion Program, a roster of outside designers. That drawing is only half a coin. Someone still has to sculpt it: build the image up in three dimensions, decide how high each element stands, where the light will catch, where a shadow will fall. That is the sculptor-engraver's job, and it is the difference between a coin that looks alive and one that looks like a printed sticker.

Hemphill works the way the old masters did, only with new tools. She builds her relief on oversized blanks — sometimes in clay, sometimes in 3-D software — and the design is then reduced to coin size. For the 2024 Celia Cruz quarter she spent about three weeks carving the model in hard clay on an eight-inch disc before it was shrunk to the size of a 25-cent piece. Her signature is high relief: designs that rise dramatically off the field, the way a real sculpture does, instead of lying nearly flat. High relief is hard. It fights the way modern coins are struck, and it takes a sculptor who can judge exactly how much depth a press can capture in a single blow. It is no accident that the Mint kept handing her the high-relief gold coins.

Her stated influences are a who's-who of the great medal artists — Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Adolph A. Weinman in America, and the French masters Jules-Clément Chaplain, Oscar Roty, and Jean-Baptiste Daniel-Dupuis, whose elegant low-relief portraits defined the golden age of the medal. That classical eye, paired with a willingness to use 3-D software, is what makes her work feel both old and new at once.

The clearest place to see Hemphill's hand is the American Liberty gold series — the Mint's showcase for high-relief artistry. She sculpted the obverse — the heads side — of the 2015 American Liberty High Relief gold coin, a modern Liberty standing crowned with leaves, holding a torch and the American flag, from a design by Justin Kunz. Two years later she sculpted the obverse of the 2017 American Liberty 225th Anniversary gold coin — the now-famous design, again by Kunz, that portrayed Liberty as a youthful African-American woman in a crown of stars, a deliberate break from a century of classical white profiles. Both were struck in .9999 fine gold at West Point, in the demanding high relief she is known for, and her italic PH initials sit beside the 2017 portrait.

She is also a fixture of the First Spouse gold coin program, which honors America's first ladies in one-ounce gold. She sculpted the obverse portrait of Bess Truman for the 2015 coin — designed by Joel Iskowitz — and worked across the wider series. And her medallic work reaches well beyond Liberty: she sculpted the obverse of the 2013 William McKinley Presidential dollar, contributed to the Five-Star Generals and Code Talkers series, and sculpted several America the Beautiful quarters, including Gettysburg, the Grand Canyon, Mount Hood, and Yosemite.

One coin stands apart, because she did the whole thing. For the 2024 Celia Cruz quarter — part of the American Women Quarters program — Hemphill was both the designer and the sculptor, a rare double credit for a Mint artist. She drew and modeled the salsa legend mid-performance in a ruffled rumba dress, microphone raised, her signature cry "Azúcar!" worked into the design. After a career spent giving other people's drawings their depth, here the drawing was hers too.