Barbara Fox

Most people who own a Barbara Fox design have no idea. They turned over a Girl Scouts silver dollar, or a National Park Service half dollar, and held a drawing she made at a desk in upstate New York.

Fox is a painter first. She earned her degree in studio art at the University of California, Davis, and built a career in watercolor and oil — meticulous still lifes, figures, and flowers, glazed in thin layers the way the Dutch masters worked. She is a signature member of the National Watercolor Society and the International Guild of Realism, and she has illustrated for American Greetings, Timex, and Disney. She works out of a studio in Ellicottville, in the hills of Cattaraugus County.

In 2007 she joined the U.S. Mint's Artistic Infusion Program — a roster of outside American artists the Mint invites to design coins and medals. She was not a Mint employee carving steel; she was the designer, the person who decided what a coin should show and how it should feel. Over the next dozen years, more than twenty of her designs were struck into circulating coins, commemoratives, and medals. By the time her run ended around 2020, the Mint counted her among its Master Designers.

A U.S. coin is usually made by two hands, not one. A designer like Fox draws the idea; a Mint sculptor-engraver turns that drawing into a three-dimensional model and, eventually, the die — the hardened steel stamp that strikes the metal. On most of Fox's coins you'll see two names: hers, and the engraver's.

That split suited her, because what Fox brought was a painter's eye for feeling. Her own description of her art applies just as well to her coins: "I crave beauty, peace, and order." Her best-known design proves it — the reverse — the tails side — of the 2017 New Jersey quarter, where an immigrant family approaches Ellis Island carrying a whole future's worth of hope and uncertainty. The Mint's own praise singled out her "sensitive and naturalistic portrayals of people and nature," and a feeling of calm that runs through the work.

That instinct shaped a long list of national-park quarters too — Glacier, Acadia, Saratoga, Cumberland Gap — landscapes rendered with a watercolorist's patience. She also designed Code Talkers Congressional Gold Medals and worked in the First Spouse gold program. Her commemoratives reward a close look: she liked to hide a small human moment inside a big public subject.

Four of Fox's commemorative designs are catalogued here, and they show her range.

On the 2013 Girl Scouts of the USA Centennial silver dollar, she designed the obverse — the heads side. Three girls of different ages stand together, ringed by the words Courage · Confidence · Character and the Girl Scout trefoil. Mint sculptor-engraver Phebe Hemphill modeled it.

The 2016 National Park Service Centennial half dollar carries one of her warmest scenes on its obverse: a hiker taking in the wilderness while, lower down, a small child discovers a frog hiding in the ferns. Michael Gaudioso sculpted it.

And on both the 2013 Five-Star Generals $5 gold coin and the silver dollar, Fox designed the reverse — the same image on both: the Leavenworth Lamp, an emblem of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College. Joseph Menna sculpted both. The obverses, with the generals' portraits, were designed by other Artistic Infusion artists — a reminder that a single coin can carry more than one hand.