Susan Gamble

For most of American history, the people who designed the nation's coins worked inside the Mint — staff sculptors, hired and trained, bent over plaster in Philadelphia. Susan Gamble was not one of them. She was a graphic designer and illustrator from Virginia who, in 2004, answered an open call.

That call was the Artistic Infusion Program — the Mint's then-new effort to bring outside artists into coin design and shake fresh ideas into a craft that had grown inward-looking. Gamble was chosen as one of the program's original 24 designers. Within four years she would win its top design award, rise to its senior rank of Master Designer, and put her name on a coin that won one of the highest honors in world numismatics.

She was born in 1957 in Lynchburg, Virginia, and grew up in Danville. She earned a fine arts degree from Virginia Commonwealth University in 1978, then built a thirty-year career as a designer and illustrator — running her own graphic-design business while moving often as the wife of an Air Force officer, Michael Gamble. Along the way she painted presidents long before she ever rendered one's wife in metal.

Gamble died on January 14, 2015, at 57, in New Braunfels, Texas. She had survived both diabetes and breast cancer, and spent years advocating against them. In barely a decade of coin work she left behind nearly two dozen adopted designs — coin for coin, one of the most prolific bodies of work by any modern American designer.

Here is the thing most people get wrong about modern coins: the artist who designs one and the artist who sculpts it are usually two different people. Gamble was a designer. She drew the picture and built the composition; a staff sculptor-engraver at the Mint then translated her flat drawing into the three-dimensional model — the relief — that gets turned into the steel dies that strike the coin. She never carved a coin in her life. That was the whole point of the Artistic Infusion Program: hire the eye, let the Mint's hands finish the job.

Her gift was narrative inside an impossibly small frame. A coin gives you a circle the width of a fingernail and almost no depth, and Gamble used it to stage scenes, not just faces.

Take the work her colleagues called her finest: the reverse — the tails side — of the 2007 Jamestown 400th Anniversary silver dollar. Gamble drew three tall ships under sail — the Susan Constant, the Godspeed, and the Discovery, the vessels that carried England's first permanent settlers to Virginia in 1607. The Mint's Charles L. Vickers sculpted it. In the 2009 Coin of the Year Awards — the international prizes that are the closest thing the coin world has to the Oscars — it took Most Historically Significant, one of three U.S. wins that year. Former Chief Engraver John Mercanti, who had once told her to keep submitting designs because one day they'd be chosen, named it his favorite of her work.

You can hear the same affection from the people she worked beside. Joel Iskowitz, a fellow Artistic Infusion designer, called her obverse — the heads side — for the 2008 Bald Eagle five-dollar gold coin among the most beautiful designs in American coinage. What ran through nearly all of it was a steady classical hand and a love of the human moment: a button being sewn, three ships leaning into the wind, a half-built dome reaching for a sky.

Most of Gamble's coins were gold and silver for collectors. But two of her designs landed in ordinary American pockets.

In 2009, the Lincoln cent turned 200, and the Mint marked it with four special reverse designs telling Abraham Lincoln's life in four chapters. Gamble drew the last one — "Presidency in Washington, D.C." — a three-quarter view of the unfinished Capitol dome, scaffolding and all, as it stood during Lincoln's wartime years. Joseph Menna sculpted it; her initials SG sit just left of the denomination. Billions of these were struck. If you were alive in 2009, you have almost certainly held a Susan Gamble design without knowing it.

She also designed the reverses of three state quarters — Washington (2007), Alaska (2008), and Oklahoma (2008) — from the wildly popular fifty-state series, plus two later America the Beautiful quarters for Olympic and Denali national parks. Add the obverse portraits of Presidents James K. Polk and Franklin Pierce on their dollar coins, the "Delaware Treaty" Native American dollar reverse, and a long run of commemoratives — the U.S. Army silver dollar, the Louis Braille bicentennial coins, the "A More Perfect Union" platinum eagle, the U.S. Marshals half dollar, the Kisatchie National Forest quarter — and a pattern emerges: there were very few corners of the modern U.S. coin program her drawings didn't reach.

The First Spouse gold coins <!-- kind: prose; anchor: first-spouse -->

The project that defined her, though, was a quiet one. In 2007 the Mint launched the First Spouse gold coins — a half-ounce of 24-karat gold honoring each First Lady, struck alongside the Presidential dollar that bore her husband. (For presidents who served without a wife, a figure of Liberty stood in.) The obverse carried the First Lady's portrait; the reverse told a scene from her life. It was tailor-made for an artist who thought in stories.

The very first coin in the series carried Gamble's work. Its reverse shows Martha Washington sewing a button onto her husband's uniform — a small, true tribute to the woman who wintered with the army at Valley Forge and earned the soldiers' lasting devotion. Mint sculptor-engraver Don Everhart turned her drawing into relief.

Across the program's run, Gamble's hand appears on seven First Spouse coins in all — sometimes the obverse portrait, sometimes the reverse scene:

• Martha Washington (2007) — reverse
• Louisa Adams (2008) — obverse
• Letitia Tyler (2009) — reverse
• Abigail Fillmore (2010) — reverse
• Lucy Hayes (2011) — obverse
• Alice Paul (2012) — obverse
• Ida McKinley (2013) — obverse

The program ran ten years and ended in 2016. By then Gamble was gone — but she had helped open it, and her name sits on more of its coins than almost anyone's.