Ronald D. Sanders

Ronald D. Sanders did not grow up inside the Mint. He came to coins the way a lot of modern American coin artists now do — through a program built to find outside talent.

He is a graduate of the Columbus College of Art and Design in Ohio, and an award-winning artist who worked in fine art and illustration before any of his work appeared in a pocket or a presentation case. In the early 2010s he joined the U.S. Mint's Artistic Infusion Program — the AIP, a roster of independent artists the Mint invites to submit designs for the nation's coins and medals. The Mint's own staff sculptors then choose among those drawings and carve the winners.

That distinction matters, and it is the key to reading his credit line. Sanders is a designer, not an engraver. He draws the concept; a Mint medallic artist — the in-house sculptor — turns the drawing into the three-dimensional steel die (the hardened metal stamp that strikes the coin). On the finished coin you will often see two sets of initials: the designer's and the sculptor's. Both did real, different work.

His first design to actually become a coin appeared in 2012, on the National Infantry Museum and Soldier Center commemorative silver dollar. From there his drawings spread across the everyday coinage — reverse designs for the America the Beautiful quarters and for the small-dollar programs — and onto two commemoratives that colcur tracks.

Designing for a coin is a strange, narrow craft. You are drawing for a canvas the size of a thumbnail, in a medium where the only colors are light and shadow on metal. An idea has to read instantly, survive being shrunk, and still feel like more than a logo. Sanders' coin work tends toward exactly that — single, clean, symbolic images that carry one idea.

Take his two colcur-tracked coins. For the End of World War II 75th Anniversary gold coin (2020), he drew an eagle in flight, gripping an olive branch — the branch of peace — in its right talon. It is a deliberate echo of the 1945 Great Seal, the eagle turned toward peace rather than war, struck for the moment a war ended. The Mint's sculptor Phebe Hemphill carved it into the half-ounce 24-karat gold.

For the National Law Enforcement Memorial and Museum half dollar (2021), he drew the front — the obverse, the "heads" side — as a single sheriff's star, the oldest shorthand for the people who serve and protect. John P. McGraw sculpted it. (The coin's reverse, the eye-and-fingerprint design, is by a different artist, Heidi Wastweet — a good reminder that a single coin can carry two designers, one per side.)

What links his work is restraint. One emblem, clearly told. That is harder than it sounds at coin scale, and it is why the Mint keeps drawing on artists like him.