Miley Busiek — the artist who put a family on the gold coin

Miley Busiek did not come up through the U.S. Mint. She came up through Beaumont, Texas, where she graduated from the local high school, and she taught herself to make art — one evening class in Dallas was close to the whole of her formal training. That makes what she pulled off all the more unlikely.

In 1980 she watched Ronald Reagan accept the Republican nomination. The line that stuck with her was the call for a "new beginning," for Americans pulling together. She sketched a response: not the lone, stern heraldic eagle that had stared off American money for two centuries, but a family of eagles — a parent returning to a nest, a mate sheltering the young.

She wasn't designing a coin. Not yet. She was designing an idea. The coin came later, and only because she refused to let the idea sit in a drawer.

Today she works as Miley Tucker-Frost, a monumental sculptor whose large-scale bronzes turn up in serious collections — among them the Reagan Presidential Library, the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, and the University of Texas at Austin.

Busiek's gift on the Gold Eagle is compositional, not just decorative. For two hundred years the eagle on U.S. coinage had been a symbol of power — talons, arrows, a single bird facing front. Busiek flipped the emotion. Her reverse — the "tails" side — shows a male eagle gliding in with an olive branch in his talons, above a nest where a female eagle wraps her wings around two eaglets. Same national bird, completely different message: not the state, but the home the state protects. She called it "a symbolic tribute to the American family, senior citizens and young people."

Here is the part that sets her apart from almost every other name on American coinage. A coin design usually wins because a committee picks it. Busiek's won because she went out and built a coalition for it. When Congress took up legislation for a new gold bullion coin, she pressed her case directly — recruiting Texas figures with national reach, including the football coaches Tom Landry and Joe Gibbs, gathering letters of support, lobbying members of Congress and their staff, and testifying at hearings. The Gold Bullion Coin Act was signed on December 17, 1985, and the reverse it called for matched the family of eagles she had been carrying around for five years.

One honest note on credit. Busiek created the design; she did not cut the dies. As is normal at the Mint, a staff sculptor-engraver — Sherl Joseph Winter — translated her artwork into the relief (the raised, three-dimensional surface) that gets struck into metal. That is why two sets of initials sit on the 1986–2021 coins: MB for Busiek, JW for Winter. A coin is almost always a collaboration between the artist who imagines it and the engraver who makes it strikeable.