Laurie Musser

For most of her career, Laurie Musser's art arrived in the mail. She spent more than twenty years as an illustrator at American Greetings — one of the country's big "social expression" companies, the kind that makes the cards people buy for birthdays and holidays. It is steady, anonymous work. Millions of people held her drawings without ever knowing her name.

Then she struck out on her own. In 2019 she founded Chalkboard Studio in Strongsville, Ohio, taking on surface patterns, portraits, and commercial design under her own banner. That same year, a very different client signed her up: the United States Mint.

In July 2019 the Mint admitted Musser to its Artistic Infusion Program — a roster of outside artists the Mint draws on to design coins and medals. AIP designers don't carve the metal themselves. They create the artwork; a Mint sculptor-engraver then translates it into the three-dimensional relief that gets struck into a coin. A few years after leaving the greeting-card business, Musser's drawings were ending up not on paper, but on gold.

Musser is a portraitist at heart, and her best-known coins are faces. The discipline of a coin portrait is brutal: you have a circle a few centimeters wide, and within it you have to capture a likeness that will still read clearly after the design is shrunk, sculpted into low relief, and stamped into hard metal. There is no room for a stray line.

Her trained range helps. She works in watercolor, pencil, pastel, charcoal, acrylic, and oil, and moves fluidly into digital tools — the same fluency between hand-drawing and software that a modern Mint design demands. A coin design begins as flat artwork, so the clarity of that first drawing decides everything that follows.

Twice the Mint has paired Musser's portraits with the same sculptor, the veteran medallic artist Phebe Hemphill — once for an astronaut, once for a baseball founder. That partnership is the through-line of her early Mint work: Musser draws the face, Hemphill gives it depth.

In 2022 the U.S. Mint marked a century of the Negro National League — the league a pitcher and manager named Andrew "Rube" Foster organized in 1920, when Black players were shut out of the white major leagues. The commemorative program included a $5 gold coin, and the job of putting Foster's face on it went to Laurie Musser.

Her obverse — the "heads" side — shows Foster in his cap, his signature reproduced at the lower right. Hemphill sculpted it. The coin is small and almost pure gold: 8.359 grams of 90% gold, 21.6 mm across, struck to a maximum of 50,000 pieces across all finishes. The reverse, designed by Donna Weaver and sculpted by Eric David Custer, shows the gesture of tipping a cap — a sign of respect on the field.

It is a fitting commission for a portraitist who spent her career making images meant to honor people. The man who built a league out of exclusion now looks out from a coin, drawn by an artist most of America had unknowingly admired for years.