Thomas Cleveland

For two centuries the U.S. Mint drew its coins from within. A small bench of staff sculptor-engravers cut the dies — the hardened steel stamps that press a design into blank metal — and the same hands shaped one coin after another. The look of American money was, in effect, a closed shop.

Then the 50 State Quarters arrived, and with them a flood of public criticism that the designs were dull. So in 2003 the Mint tried something it had almost never done: it threw the doors open. It called for outside artists — illustrators, painters, designers with no coinage experience at all — to bring fresh eyes to the most-circulated art in America. The program was the Artistic Infusion Program, run in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts, and it changed who got to design a U.S. coin.

Thomas S. Cleveland answered that call. Born in Oklahoma on June 8, 1960, he had built a career in commercial art — advertising, illustration, design — the kind of work that has to sell an idea in a single glance. He had no background in coins. In early 2004 he was chosen, along with about a dozen other designers, from roughly 250 applicants. He stayed a full decade, until 2014, and by the end was one of only three original Master Designers still in the program. He was exactly the kind of artist the old Mint would never have hired, and precisely the kind the new program was built to find.

A coin is a cruel place to make a picture. The whole composition lives on a disc smaller than a postage stamp, struck in relief — raised metal catching light, not ink on paper — and it has to read clearly at arm's length while surviving a magnifying glass. Cleveland came at it from illustration, where the job is to compress a whole idea into one clean image, and that instinct runs through his coins: a single legible subject, doing one thing, with the meaning packed tight around it.

His best-known design is the reverse — the "tails" side — of the 2007 American Platinum Eagle. He drew a bald eagle thrusting upward with its wings spread for freedom, sheltered by a federal shield, with one word across it: FREEDOM. It was the Executive Branch entry in a three-year platinum series called "The Foundations of American Democracy." Cleveland supplied the drawing; Mint medallic sculptor Phebe Hemphill cut it into the die.

That division is worth knowing, because you'll meet it again and again on his work: designed by Thomas Cleveland, sculpted by someone else. In this program an outside artist creates the design, and a staff sculptor-engraver renders it into steel. The idea is Cleveland's; the metal is a collaboration. The Vicksburg quarter below was carried into relief by Joseph Menna — who would later become the Mint's Chief Engraver.

Cleveland's grandest design rides on platinum, but his most traveled one is humble: the reverse of the 2010 Native American (Sacagawea) dollar. The obverse keeps Glenna Goodacre's familiar Sacagawea portrait; the back is all Cleveland.

He drew the Hiawatha Belt — the wampum record of the founding of the Haudenosaunee, the Iroquois Confederacy — with a bundle of five arrows bound together and an eagle above. Under the theme "Great Tree of Peace," the belt's five symbols stand for the five original nations: the central white pine for the Onondaga, the four squares for the Mohawk, Oneida, Cayuga, and Seneca. The inscriptions read Haudenosaunee and Great Law of Peace. It is a quiet, dense piece of history — a story of unity told in symbols — and unlike his gold and platinum pieces, this one was minted for general use. If you've handled a golden dollar from 2010, you may have held a Cleveland design without ever knowing his name.

His ten years in the program produced 15 design credits, and they reach into corners of American history. He drew the reverse of the 2011 Vicksburg quarter in the America the Beautiful series — the ironclad gunboat USS Cairo on the Yazoo River, the first warship ever sunk by an electrically detonated mine. He worked on the 2011 U.S. Army half dollar, the 2010 Disabled American Veterans silver dollar, and the Congressional Gold Medals honoring the Code Talkers of the Meskwaki, Choctaw, and Crow Creek Sioux nations (2013) — the Native American servicemen whose languages became unbreakable battlefield codes.

After leaving the program in 2014 he kept teaching art near his home in Cypress, Texas, and stayed close to collectors in an unusual way. In January 2017 he signed an exclusive deal with the grading service PCGS to hand-sign his autograph, in silver ink, onto certified examples of coins he had designed — starting, fittingly, with that 2007 Platinum Eagle reverse. It's a tidy coda for an illustrator: the signature collectors now chase on a Cleveland coin is the same hand that drew it.