Laurie J. Musser

Laurie J. Musser grew up in rural Pennsylvania, on a family farm and in the woods around it. She watched the wildlife there — deer, rabbits, squirrels, birds — and that watching became her subject. Decades later she still paints it, and she paints it her own way: from photographs she takes herself, because, she says, using someone else's photo would be stealing the experience. Every line on the page is drawn by her hand.

That's an unusual path to a U.S. coin. Musser trained at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, then spent the first half of her career inside the "social expression" business — the greeting-card world — as a designer and illustrator. Greeting cards, garden figurines, ornaments, textile patterns sold around the world, animated e-cards: commercial art that has to read instantly and carry feeling. It is, when you think about it, exactly the skill a coin needs.

In July 2019 the U.S. Mint named her to its Artistic Infusion Program — the AIP, a roster of outside American artists the Mint brings in to design coins and medals alongside its own staff. She was one of 27 chosen that year. Within two years, one of her drawings was on a coin sold across the country.

On a U.S. coin, two names usually share the credit, and they do different jobs. The designer draws the artwork — the flat image. The sculptor (the Mint calls them medallic artists) turns that drawing into three dimensions: the relief, the depth, the way light will catch the metal when it's struck. Musser is a designer. Her drawings have been brought into relief by the Mint's own sculptors.

Her strongest tool is the portrait. The work she's best known for is figurative — a human face, carefully observed, made to carry an emotion at coin scale. That's harder than it sounds. A portrait on a silver dollar is roughly the width of a quarter once you account for the rim, and it has to hold up both in your palm and in a catalog photo. Musser's McAuliffe and her Rube Foster both lean on the same instinct that drove her wildlife work: long, patient observation, then a clean line that captures the living look of a face.

Her two issued coin designs to date are both obverses — the "heads" side, the side that carries the principal portrait — and both were sculpted by Mint medallic artist Phebe Hemphill.

The 2021 Christa McAuliffe silver dollar. Christa McAuliffe was the New Hampshire schoolteacher chosen to be the first private citizen in space; she died with six crewmates when the space shuttle Challenger broke apart 73 seconds after launch in 1986. Congress authorized a commemorative dollar in her memory, and the Mint released it on January 28, 2021 — the 35th anniversary of that morning. Musser designed the obverse: a portrait of McAuliffe with, in the Mint's words, a hopeful gaze. Phebe Hemphill sculpted it. (The reverse, showing McAuliffe teaching, was a separate design by Emily Damstra, sculpted by Joseph Menna.) The coin is 99.9% silver, 38.1 mm across, and weighs 26.73 grams; ten dollars from every coin sold went to the FIRST robotics program. The Mint was authorized to strike up to 350,000.

The 2022 Negro Leagues Baseball $5 gold coin. For the program marking the centennial of the Negro National League, Musser designed the obverse of the gold five-dollar piece: a portrait of Rube Foster, the pitcher, manager, and executive who founded the league in 1920, shown with his signature. Phebe Hemphill again did the sculpting. It put Musser's work onto a U.S. gold coin within three years of joining the AIP.