Joseph F. Menna: the sculptor who carves coins out of pixels

Joseph Francis Menna calls himself "a lifelong card-carrying comics geek." He has sculpted Batman, Voldemort, and Darth Maul. He has also sculpted George Washington — and Washington is the one you can hold in your hand.

Menna was born in March 1970 and grew up in New Jersey. He trained the hard way, the classical way: a Bachelor of Fine Arts in sculpture from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, a Master of Fine Arts from the New York Academy of Art, then post-graduate work at the Stieglitz State Academy in St. Petersburg, Russia. He learned to model the human figure in clay the way artists had for centuries — with his hands, his eyes, and a lot of patience.

Then he picked up a mouse. Long before he joined the government, Menna built a career as one of the most sought-after sculptors of collectible figures, working for DC, McFarlane Toys, and Hasbro. He did it in software — sculpting fantasy heroes and villains as 3D digital models. He took that craft seriously: "There's a responsibility to make it everything it could possibly be for the fans," he said of the comic characters he sculpted.

In 2005, the U.S. Mint hired him. He was the first full-time digitally skilled artist the Mint had ever employed — and that single hire would reshape the look of American coinage.

For most of American history, a coin began as a clay or plaster model many times larger than the finished piece. The artist sculpted in relief — figures raised off a flat background, the way a portrait stands out from a coin's surface. A machine called a reducing lathe then shrank that model down to coin size and cut it into a steel die, the hardened stamp that strikes the design into metal blanks.

Menna does the first part on a screen. Using software like ZBrush, he builds the model as a 3D digital sculpture, then sends that file straight to a milling machine that cuts the die — no physical clay required. It sounds like a shortcut. It is not. The detail demands are brutal: a 3D printer, he once explained, "can produce something that has the amount of detail of Play-Doh, but for production you need the detail of fine marble."

He is careful to say it is its own art form, not a cheaper version of the old one. "It's a completely different medium," he said. "It's not like sculpting and it's not like drawing." His classical training, oddly, is what makes the digital work sing — he knows what a face is supposed to do under light before he ever builds it in pixels.

That blend made him a quiet revolutionary inside the Mint. His predecessor, longtime Chief Engraver John Mercanti, is widely reported to have nicknamed him the "Yoda" of digital sculpting — the master who taught the rest of the staff the new craft. (The nickname is repeated across the numismatic press; treat the exact wording as numismatic lore rather than a documented quote.)

Menna's signature credit is also the most fitting one. He designed and sculpted the obverse — the heads side — of the very first Presidential dollar: George Washington, struck in 2007. It launched a coin program that would run through dozens of presidents, and the founding face was his.

He didn't stop there. He sculpted the Thomas Jefferson dollar and the Theodore Roosevelt dollar, and over the years his portraits and designs reached well beyond the dollar series — including the 2013 Mount Rushmore quarter, praised for zooming in on the human drama of the carving rather than cramming the whole mountain onto a coin.

His reach extends past money entirely. Menna created the digital concept sculpture for the Statue of Unity in Gujarat, India — at roughly 597 feet, the tallest statue on Earth. The same hands (and software) that shaped a coin you can lose in a sofa cushion also shaped the largest human figure ever built.