Arthur Graham Carey

Arthur Graham Carey was not a Mint engraver, and he never tried to be one. He was a craftsman and a thinker — a man who built a long career around a single question: what makes an object made by hand worth making at all?

Born in 1892, Carey became one of the most influential American voices for sacred and liturgical art in the twentieth century. He settled in Newport, Rhode Island, and turned his energy toward the idea that good work — honest, useful, beautiful objects made with skill — was itself a kind of spiritual practice. He founded the journal The Catholic Art Quarterly, later renamed Good Work, and in 1937 he helped found the Catholic Art Association, which he advised for the rest of its life.

So when Rhode Island needed someone to design a coin in 1936, the choice was less strange than it sounds. Carey lived in the state, moved in its art circles, and had a partner who could carve.

That partner was John Howard Benson, who owned the John Stevens Shop in Newport — a stone-cutting and lettering workshop founded in 1705 and still running today. Benson was a master of letterforms; Carey was the designer-thinker. Together they wrote The Elements of Lettering, a teaching book that stayed in print for decades and shaped how American designers thought about the shapes of letters.

The two men were a natural pairing for a coin. A coin design lives or dies on its lettering and its low relief — the shallow, sculpted surface that has to read clearly when it's only a few millimeters deep and worn smooth in pockets. Carey and Benson had already cut dies for small medals, which is exactly why Rhode Island's School of Design pointed the state's tercentenary commission their way. They went on to win the design through a public competition.

Carey's other great numismatic work came the same year, and it ran straight through his own world. In 1936 he designed and engraved the medal for the three-hundredth anniversary of Harvard University — a bronze and silver medallion centered on Harvard's VERITAS shield of three open books, handed to delegates at the Tercentenary celebration. It is held today by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.