Jamie Franki

Jamie Franki was not a Mint engraver. He was an illustration professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, with a master's degree from Syracuse University earned in 1988 and a quarter-century of teaching ahead of him. He drew. He sculpted. He cared, by his own account, about commemoration — about objects that carry an idea forward in time.

Then, in 2004, the U.S. Mint went looking for outside artists. It had launched the Artistic Infusion Program — a stable of working illustrators and sculptors invited to submit designs alongside the Mint's own staff engravers, to shake fresh blood into American coinage. Franki was appointed a Master Designer in that program in February 2004. Within two years, his work would be in every cash register in the country.

His timing was perfect. Congress had just ordered the nickel redesigned. The Westward Journey Nickel Series (2004–2005) marked the bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark Expedition with a run of temporary designs — and the law that authorized it required the familiar Monticello to return in 2006. The door was open for new art on America's smallest-denomination workhorse coin, and Franki walked through it twice.

His first hit was the American Bison — the buffalo. For the first half of 2005, Franki designed the reverse — the tails side — of the nickel: a powerful, grazing bison rendered as a deliberate nod to James Earle Fraser's beloved 1913 Buffalo nickel. (Collectors love to say Fraser's original buffalo was modeled on "Black Diamond," a bison at the Central Park Zoo — a story that is charming, widely repeated, and never fully verified.) Franki's bison was sculpted into steel by Mint engraver Norman E. Nemeth. The public adored it: the design won the international Coin of the Year (COTY) award as the Most Popular Coin of 2005.

But his signature achievement came next. For the 2006 obverse — the heads side — Franki did something nobody had done on a circulating American coin: he turned the president to face the viewer head-on. Working from Rembrandt Peale's 1800 portrait of Jefferson — painted the year Jefferson was elected — he sketched a confident, forward-gazing Thomas Jefferson, eyes meeting yours across the coin. It broke a 68-year run of Felix Schlag's profile and became the first U.S. circulating coin to depict a president facing forward.

That is the heart of Franki's craft: he is a portraitist who thinks like a storyteller. The 2006 nickel doesn't just show Jefferson's likeness; it stages a gaze. He paired it with the word "Liberty" rendered in Jefferson's own handwriting — a small, intimate touch that turns a federal coin into something that feels handwritten. The portrait was sculpted by Mint engraver Donna Weaver, and it still sits on the nickel in your pocket today.