Linda Fox

For most of its history, the United States Mint drew its coins in-house. A small team of staff engravers — career artists on the federal payroll — designed nearly everything in your pocket. That changed in 2003, when the Mint launched the Artistic Infusion Program (AIP): an effort to bring in outside artists, painters and illustrators and sculptors with no Mint connection, to freshen the look of American coins and medals.

Linda Fox is one of those outsiders. In May 2014 the Mint named her one of seven new AIP artists, and she joined the others for a two-day orientation at the Philadelphia Mint — the working heart of American coinage. The group brought the program's roster to nineteen artists.

She did not come from a coin background. Fox is a fine artist who works in oil and soft pastel in the tradition of realism — the patient, observed kind of painting that aims to render a face or a building as the eye actually sees it. Her commissioned work runs to portraits, still-life, architecture, even pets. She also works as a digital graphic artist in the standard professional tools — Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign. That combination — a trained portraitist who is also fluent in digital design — is exactly the profile the Mint's program was built to recruit.

A coin is a brutal place to make a portrait. You have a circle a few centimeters wide, almost no depth to work with — the relief, the height the design rises off the flat field, is measured in fractions of a millimeter — and a face that has to read clearly the moment someone glances at it. Everything a portrait painter knows about turning a head into the light, about which line of a jaw or cheekbone makes a likeness "click," has to survive being squeezed into that tiny, shallow space.

This is where Fox's training shows. Her one struck design to date is a portrait, and it is built the way a painter builds one: the subject's head turned slightly so she faces the viewer almost directly, the features read as a calm, recognizable likeness rather than a stiff profile.

Worth being clear about the division of labor, because it trips up newcomers. On a modern U.S. coin, the designer and the sculptor are usually two different people. The designer draws the artwork; the sculptor translates that flat drawing into the three-dimensional model the dies are made from — the die being the hardened steel stamp that strikes the design into the metal blank. Fox is the designer. The sculpting was done by a Mint medallic artist. The coin is, in the truest sense, a collaboration: her eye, his hands.

The coin that carries Fox's work belongs to the First Spouse program — a series of half-ounce gold coins honoring the spouses of U.S. presidents, struck alongside the Presidential dollar series. Lady Bird Johnson, wife of Lyndon B. Johnson and a tireless champion of conservation and roadside beautification, was the 2015 honoree.

Fox designed the obverse — the heads side. Her portrait of Mrs. Johnson is surrounded by the required inscriptions: LADY BIRD JOHNSON, IN GOD WE TRUST, LIBERTY, the date 2015, the West Point mint mark W, "36th," and the years 1963–1969. Her initials, LLF, sit by Johnson's shoulder. The portrait was sculpted for striking by Mint medallic artist Michael Gaudioso.

The reverse — the tails side — is a separate artist's work: AIP designer Chris Costello drew a scene of the Jefferson Memorial, the Washington Monument and flowers, with the inscription BEAUTIFY OUR CITIES, PARKS & HIGHWAYS, a direct nod to Mrs. Johnson's beautification work. It was sculpted by Renata Gordon.

The coin is a $10 denomination, a half ounce of .9999 fine gold, struck at the West Point facility. The Mint capped the whole program — proof and uncirculated combined — at 10,000 coins. It went on sale at noon Eastern on August 27, 2015. The proof version's final mintage came in very low, in the low thousands, which is part of why these late First Spouse coins draw collector interest today.