Joseph Menna

In 2005 the United States Mint hired a sculptor who built his figures inside a computer.

That was unusual. For more than two centuries, every coin the Mint made began the same way: an artist pressed thumbs into clay or wax, shaped a portrait several inches across, then a machine slowly traced that model down to coin size. Joseph Menna could do all of that. But he could also do something almost no one at the Mint could — sculpt the same form on a screen, rotating it in three dimensions, with the precision of software. He was the first full-time digitally skilled artist the Mint ever brought on, and the workflow he introduced is now the house standard.

Menna was born in March 1970 and raised in Blackwood, a corner of Gloucester Township, New Jersey. He earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia in 1992, then a master's in sculpture from the New York Academy of Art in 1994 — schools built on rigorous, old-fashioned training in drawing the human figure. He kept going: the Art Students League of New York, and post-graduate study in Russia at the Saint Petersburg Stieglitz State Academy of Art and Design, under the Soviet-born sculptor Leonid Lerman, whom he credits as his mentor. (He met his wife at the Stieglitz academy.)

Then comes the twist that makes Menna interesting. By night, that classically trained sculptor was one of the busiest digital artists in the collectibles business — building action figures and statues for DC Comics, McFarlane Toys, Dark Horse Comics, and Hasbro, using the sculpting software ZBrush. He grew up on comic books, Star Wars, and Doctor Who, and he poured that pop-culture fluency into the same hands that had learned anatomy the hard way. When the Mint needed someone who could bridge clay and code, there were very few people on Earth more qualified.

Menna's signature is that he never treated digital sculpting as a shortcut. He treated it as another chisel.

His classical training, he has said, made the move to digital sculpture relatively easy — because the hard part was never the tool. The hard part is knowing how light will fall across a cheek, how deep a fold of cloth should cut, how a portrait should sit so it reads at the size of a fingernail. A relief — the raised, sculpted surface of a coin — is really a drawing made out of shadow. Get the depths wrong and the face goes flat or muddy when it's struck into metal. Menna's gift is carrying that judgment, learned in clay, into a medium where the "clay" is virtual.

That fluency is why the work has range. He sculpted the reverse — the tails side — of the everyday Lincoln cent in your pocket, and he sculpted the soaring high relief gold coins that are among the most ambitious objects the Mint makes. High relief means the design rises far off the surface; it takes more pressure, more strikes, and more care than a normal coin, and it is the closest modern minting comes to a medal you could lose a fingertip in. Translating another artist's drawing into that kind of dimensional, strikeable form is exactly the problem Menna built a career solving.

His old boss put it memorably. John Mercanti, the Mint's previous Chief Engraver, called Menna the "Yoda of digital sculpting" and said his "ability to adapt and use digital programs was critical to the Mint moving forward." It was not faint praise. In February 2019, after the Chief Engraver's chair had sat empty for nearly a decade following Mercanti's 2010 retirement, Menna was named the Mint's 14th Chief Engraver — the artistic head of the institution, directing its sculptor-engravers and the outside artists of the Artistic Infusion Program.