John McGraw

John P. McGraw did not set out to be a sculptor. He enrolled at Rutgers University–Camden as a business major, talked out of art by the people around him. "It's funny, how people get in your ear and tell you, 'You're never going to make money as an artist,'" he later recalled. Two years of business courses went badly. He withdrew, took jobs in construction and a bakery, and then went back — this time for the degree he had actually wanted.

He finished his art degree at Rutgers–Camden in 1995. His first real work was the unglamorous, hands-on kind: a sculptor at Carolfi Studios in New Jersey, restoring and fabricating architectural ornament for buildings as far-flung as a Bahamas casino and a New York City college hall. It taught him wood, clay, plaster, and mold-making — the physical craft of turning an idea into a three-dimensional object.

In 1998 he moved to Lenox, the American china and giftware house, where he stayed sixteen years. There he learned the discipline that would define his coin work: low relief — sculpting a design that reads as three-dimensional while rising only a fraction of a millimeter off a flat surface. It is the exact problem a coin poses. Around 2000, Lenox introduced him to computer-controlled (CNC) sculpting, and he made a quiet bet on it: "That technology is going to be my future."

McGraw joined the United States Mint in January 2014 as a product design specialist, and in March 2020 became one of the Mint's small bench of medallic artists — the sculptors who turn a drawing into the actual relief that gets struck into metal. He works out of the Philadelphia Mint.

His signature is the modern medallic workflow. Where earlier Mint sculptors built a design in plaster by hand, McGraw works almost entirely as a digital sculptor — building the relief in software, then letting the Mint's machinery cut the master from his file. The instinct goes back to that 2000 bet at Lenox. The art is the same as it always was; the tool changed.

His range is wide. Beyond the American Liberty gold coin, he has worked on the American Women Quarters program — he both designed and sculpted the Jovita Idar quarter and sculpted the Anna May Wong quarter — and on the Negro Leagues Baseball commemoratives and Congressional Gold Medals, including the Larry Doby and Anwar Sadat medals. He has described the appeal of that work plainly: his designs help "champion the voices of people whom a lot of people don't know about."

The American Liberty gold coin is the Mint's showcase. Launched in 2015 and issued every other year, each one is a one-ounce, .9999 fine ("four nines") 24-karat gold piece — a high relief coin, meaning the design rises unusually far off the field. Reaching that depth takes brute force: the West Point Mint strikes each coin three times under roughly 100 metric tons of pressure. The face value is $100, and every coin carries the W mint mark of West Point.

For the 2023 edition, McGraw both designed and sculpted the reverse — the tails side. He carved a young bald eagle perched on a rocky outcropping in the instant before it takes flight: liberty as something earned through perseverance, not handed over. (The obverse — the heads side — paired it with a bristlecone pine, one of the oldest living things on Earth, sculpted by chief engraver Joe Menna from a design by Elana Hagler.)

In August 2024, that coin was named Coin of the Year in the long-running international program then run by Krause Publications — announced at the American Numismatic Association's World's Fair of Money. It is one of the most prestigious honors a mint can win, and McGraw's eagle was the design that carried it.

He returned to the series in 2025, this time sculpting the obverse: a sunflower and a bee, a small emblem of the stewardship liberty requires, from a design by Artistic Infusion Program artist Christopher Polentz.