James M. Peed

James Melvin Peed was born in Washington, North Carolina, on April 25, 1945. Before he ever touched a coin he served in the U.S. Army from 1963 to 1966, then went looking for art training — the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C. in 1969, Northern Virginia Community College in 1971–72, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1973.

He joined the U.S. Mint staff in 1972 and, from 1975, worked as a graphic artist out of the Mint's Washington, D.C. office. He rose to manage the Mint's graphics group. That title matters for understanding his work: Peed was not a marble-and-clay sculptor by trade but a designer — the person who drew the picture that another artist would then sculpt into metal.

He is a member of the American Medallic Sculpture Association. Unlike the engravers whose initials get hunted by collectors, Peed worked largely in the background of programs the public knew by their famous subjects, not their artists.

A coin has two faces. The obverse — the "heads" side — almost always carries the portrait, the headline, the reason the coin exists. The reverse gets everything else: the symbol, the seal, the eagle, the inscription that ties it all together. It is the harder side to make memorable, and it was Peed's specialty.

Look at what he was handed. For the 1992 Olympic $5 gold coin — the XXV Olympiad issue, struck while the Games were held in Albertville and Barcelona — the front went to a sprinter charging at the viewer. Peed got the back, and gave it an American eagle with a shield across its breast under the Olympic rings. For the 1997 Jackie Robinson gold coin, William Cousins drew the portrait of an older Robinson the civil-rights leader; Peed designed the reverse — a single baseball marked "1919–1972," Robinson's birth and death years, around the words "Legacy of Courage." One side is the man. The other is the whole life, in one stitched ball.

His most quietly demanding job may have been the 1998 Robert F. Kennedy silver dollar. Kennedy served as Attorney General and as a U.S. Senator, so the reverse — which Peed designed with sculptor-engraver Thomas D. Rogers Sr. — layers the eagle-and-shield of the Department of Justice seal against the seal of the United States Senate. It is the kind of design that has to carry biography through heraldry, with no portrait to lean on.

There's also a near-miss worth knowing. For the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic $10 gold eagle, Peed drew male and female torchbearers — but the design that reached the coin was reworked by John Mercanti. It's a reminder of how Mint design really works: a sketch passes through many hands before it's struck, and credit is often shared.