Jim Licaretz

Jim Licaretz left the U.S. Mint in 1989 to sculpt for a toy company. Seventeen years later he came back and helped redesign the most familiar coin in America.

That detour is the key to him. Most Mint engravers are coin people their whole careers. Licaretz is a sculptor — born in Philadelphia on September 9, 1949, and trained in the old, hands-in-the-clay tradition at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he won the Edmond Stewardson figure-modeling prize and a travel scholarship. To him a penny and a museum bronze are the same problem: how to make a face or a building live in shallow relief, where you have a fraction of a millimeter of depth to work with.

He first joined the Mint as a sculptor-engraver in September 1986, then resigned in March 1989 to take his modeling skills to private industry — first the Franklin Mint, then a stint as a master sculptor at the toymaker Mattel. He returned to the Mint's Philadelphia engraving staff in late 2006 and stayed a decade, retiring at the end of 2016. The work from that second tour is what most collectors hold without knowing it: his initials sit on circulating quarters, Presidential dollars, First Spouse gold coins, commemoratives, congressional medals — and the 2009 Lincoln cent.

To read a coin credit you need two words. The designer draws the image. The sculptor-engraver — sometimes called the medallic sculptor — turns that drawing into a three-dimensional model the Mint can cut into a die, the hardened steel stamp that strikes the coin. Licaretz spent his Mint career on the second job: taking another artist's flat sketch and giving it depth, weight, and the right relief — how far the design rises off the field, the blank background of the coin.

His most-seen work is the 2009 Lincoln cent's first reverse — the "tails" side showing the Kentucky log cabin where Lincoln was born. The drawing was by Richard Masters of the Mint's Artistic Infusion Program, the outside-artist pool the Mint draws on for fresh design ideas. Licaretz did the sculpting: turning a clean line drawing of a one-room cabin into a model that would still read as a cabin after being shrunk to penny size and struck billions of times in soft copper-plated zinc. That is harder than it sounds. Detail that looks crisp at model scale turns to mush at coin scale; the sculptor has to know in advance what will survive the squeeze.

The same discipline shows up across his catalogue. He sculpted the reverse of the 2008 Bald Eagle commemorative silver dollar — a faithful rendering of the first Great Seal of the United States, the version used from 1782 to 1841. He modeled the obverse — the "heads" side — of the Andrew Jackson Presidential dollar, several America the Beautiful quarters (Shawnee National Forest in Illinois, Homestead National Monument in Nebraska), and First Spouse gold coins including Jacqueline Kennedy. Numista lists roughly four dozen coins and medals to his name.

Since retiring he has stayed in the studio, and his medal work has only sharpened. In 2023 the American Medallic Sculptors Association named his portrait medal of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky — created in 2022, the second in a series after a John Lewis medal — its American Medal of the Year. He builds these the modern way: a 3-D-printed original, cast in bonded bronze, then finished by hand with a wax patina.