Richard Masters

For most of American history, you could not just apply to design a coin. The work went to the Mint's own engraving staff, or — on rare occasions — to a famous sculptor the government courted by hand. Then, in 2003, the Mint tried something new. It launched the Artistic Infusion Program: a roster of outside artists, chosen by competition, who would submit designs alongside the in-house engravers. Richard Masters made the first cut, as one of its founding Master Designers. Two decades later, he is the only one of those inaugural artists still working.

Here is the part that surprises people. Getting picked for the program is not the same as getting a coin. Masters' own studio gallery puts the number plainly: over twenty-some years he has submitted designs for more than 160 coin and medal programs, and 37 of them have been struck. The rest are drawings the public never sees — losing entries in a quiet, relentless competition the Mint runs for nearly every coin it makes. A "Richard Masters coin" is the survivor of a long string of near-misses.

He came to it the long way. Born in Sioux City, Iowa, in 1955, Masters earned three degrees — a BA, an MA, and a Master of Fine Arts — from the University of Iowa, then taught graphic design for nearly two decades at the University of Wisconsin–Oshkosh. He was, in other words, not a coin man by trade. He was a draftsman, a teacher, and — by his own account — a collector since childhood, who answered a call for artists and kept winning.

Away from the Mint, Masters draws. His tools are graphite and colored pencil, worked to an almost photographic finish — dense city scenes, architecture, and the harder edges of urban life, including homelessness. He photographs a place, composites the shots in Photoshop, then renders the final image by hand, slowly. He is wary of the obvious label for it: "It's a painstaking process. It's very mechanical. I don't like to think of myself as a photorealist, but those are sort of my roots."

That patience is the link to his coins. A coin is a tiny canvas, struck in the millions, that has to read clearly at the size of a fingernail. In the Artistic Infusion Program, the artist creates the design — the composition, the figure, the idea — but does not cut the metal. A Mint sculptor-engraver translates the drawing into a three-dimensional model, and from that model come the dies (the hardened steel stamps that strike the coin). So Masters' coins carry two names: his, for the design, and a sculptor's, for the relief — the raised, sculpted surface you actually feel.

You see his hand most clearly when the format gives him room. A high-relief coin — one struck so the design stands up dramatically from the field, the flat background — is the closest a modern coin comes to a small sculpture. It rewards a detailed draftsman's instincts, and it is where Masters has done his most celebrated Mint work.

Two of his designs stand above the rest, and both carry an international prize: the Coin of the Year (COTY), judged each year by a panel of numismatists for the trade publisher Krause.

The first is quiet and devastating. For the 2007 Little Rock Central High School Desegregation silver dollar — marking fifty years since nine Black teenagers walked into an all-white school under armed guard — Masters chose not to draw faces. His obverse (the heads side) shows only feet: the legs and shoes of the Little Rock Nine stepping forward, beside the boots of a soldier sent to protect them, with nine stars overhead. It is a composition about courage shown from the ground up, and in 2009 it was named Best Contemporary Event Coin at the COTY awards. (The reverse, the school itself, was the work of Mint sculptor Don Everhart.)

The second is pure spectacle. For the 2019 American Liberty High Relief gold coin — a $100 piece in 99.99% gold — Masters designed the obverse: a bold, stylized Liberty facing left, hair flowing, crowned by 13 rays of light meant to stand for the free and creative spirit of America's people. Mint Chief Engraver Joseph Menna gave it its towering relief. Two years later, Masters supplied the reverse of the 2021 American Liberty gold coin — a close-up eagle, beak open mid-cry, sculpted by Phebe Hemphill. That 2021 coin went on to win Best Gold Coin at the COTY awards announced in early 2023.