Renata Gordon

Almost nobody who puts a design on a U.S. coin ever sets foot in the Mint. The artwork on most modern American coins is drawn by freelancers, mailed in, chosen by committee. Renata Gordon is one of the few who works inside the building — turning those drawings into the metal you can hold.

She grew up in New Jersey and was making art before she could really talk. "I've been creating artwork since age one and a half," she told the National Endowment for the Arts in 2019 — drawing constantly as a kid, sculpting "little things out of clay." She went on to study sculpture at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, earning her fine-arts degree in December 2010.

Then came the door that changed everything: an internship at the United States Mint in Philadelphia, starting in March 2011. There she studied something most sculptors never touch — coin and medal design, in both traditional clay and digital tools. The standard around her stunned her. "When I interned at the Mint, I realized that I was working with some of the best in the world," she said. She stayed, and became one of the Mint's staff sculptor-engravers — the small team of medallic artists who model the coins and medals the country issues.

It is a strange, old craft to practice in a digital age. A medallic artist — someone who designs and sculpts the art on coins and medals — has to think in extreme low relief: the shallow raised surface a coin can carry without jamming a stamping press. Gordon's job is to take a flat drawing and build a three-dimensional model the Mint can cut into a die, the hardened steel stamp that strikes the design into a blank disc of metal. Get the relief wrong and the coin won't strike cleanly. Get it right and a banjo seems to lean into the music.

What sets Gordon apart is where she comes from. She is not only a sculptor — she is a painter and illustrator, and she says the two halves feed each other. While at the Mint she wrote a children's book of poems and illustrated it herself; that outside freedom, she says, "feeds my work at the Mint" and keeps her eye fresh.

Her process starts not with the chisel but with looking. "I really look at it with a discerning eye to see what a drawing would look like in relief sculpture," she said. Translating a flat image into shallow bas-relief is, in her words, "extremely challenging — and it's fun." That patience shows in the texture of her coins: the flowing water of the 2017 Ozark National Scenic Riverways quarter, the tilt of a banjo on the Kentucky dollar that seems to carry rhythm, the plumage on a bald eagle's head.

She is also clear-eyed about what the work is. The Mint is a factory that stamps out billions of coins a year, but Gordon refuses to file her part under "industrial." "If I could only say one thing about the work I do here at the Mint," she said, "I would say to remember that it's in the realm of fine art."

One note on the credits, because it trips up collectors. On most modern U.S. coins, two sets of initials appear: a designer who drew the artwork and a sculptor who modeled it for striking. Many of Gordon's best-known coins are ones she sculpted from someone else's drawing — usually a freelancer in the Mint's Artistic Infusion Program, the pool of outside artists the Mint commissions designs from. That is not a lesser role. The sculptor decides how the image lives in metal — how deep, how soft, how the light will catch it — and it is her initials, RG, that ride on the finished coin beside the designer's.