Thomas Cleveland

For most of its history, the U.S. Mint drew its coins from the inside. A small bench of staff sculptor-engravers cut the dies, and the same hands shaped design after design. Then, in 2003, the Mint tried something different. It opened a call for outside artists — illustrators, painters, designers with no coin experience at all — and asked them to bring fresh eyes to the most circulated art in America. The program was called the Artistic Infusion Program, and it would change who got to design a U.S. coin.

Thomas S. Cleveland answered that call. Born in Oklahoma on June 8, 1960, he had built a working life in commercial art — advertising, illustration, design — the kind of craft that has to sell an idea in a single glance. In 2004 he was one of roughly a dozen designers chosen from about 250 applicants. He stayed for a decade, until 2014, and by the end was one of only three original Master Designers still in the program.

He was, in other words, exactly the kind of artist the old Mint would never have hired — and precisely the kind the new program was built to find.

A coin is a brutal place to make a picture. The whole composition lives inside a disc smaller than a postage stamp, struck in relief — raised metal, not ink — and it has to read at arm's length and survive a magnifying glass at the same time. Cleveland came to it from illustration, where the job is to compress meaning into one clear image, and that instinct shows in his work: a single legible subject, doing one thing, with the symbolism packed tight around it.

His best-known design is the reverse — the "tails" side — of the 2007 American Platinum Eagle. He drew a bald eagle with its wings spread wide for freedom and a federal shield held at the ready, with the single word FREEDOM across it. It was the Executive Branch entry in a three-year platinum series titled "The Foundations of American Democracy." Cleveland supplied the design; a Mint medallic sculptor cut it into the die — the standard division of labor in the program, where an outside artist's drawing becomes a staff sculptor's relief.

That split is worth knowing, because it explains a phrase you'll see again and again on his coins: designed by Thomas Cleveland, sculpted by someone else. The idea is his; the metal is a collaboration.

Cleveland's longest run of coin work was the First Spouse gold series — half-ounce, 24-karat gold coins, authorized under the Presidential $1 Coin Act of 2005, that for the first time put American First Ladies on a consecutive run of U.S. coins. He is credited on four of them, and each one had to tell a life in a single picture.

For Abigail Adams (2007) he drew her as a young woman writing to her husband John while he sat in the Continental Congress — and put her own famous plea, "Remember the Ladies," on the coin. For Anna Harrison (2009) he showed her doing what she loved, teaching students. For Florence Harding (2014) — where he designed both sides — the reverse is a small puzzle of symbols: a ballot box, a camera, a torch, a pen. They mark her as the first First Lady to cast a vote for a presidential candidate, the campaign photo-ops she staged, and her correspondence with World War I veterans.

The fourth is the odd one out, and the most interesting. The Mint had a problem: what do you do when a president had no living First Lady? For those terms it substituted a Liberty — the allegorical woman from the coinage of that president's own era. Cleveland's reverse for the 2008 Van Buren's Liberty coin is one of those stand-ins: not a portrait of a real woman, but the idea of one, borrowed from the money of Van Buren's day.

Cleveland's decade in the program produced 15 design credits across coins and medals — among them work on Sacagawea Native American dollars and a Vicksburg "America the Beautiful" quarter reverse — a substantial body of work for an artist who started as an outsider. After leaving the program in 2014, he kept his connection to collectors alive in an unusual way: in January 2017 he signed an exclusive deal with the grading service PCGS to hand-sign his autograph, in silver ink, onto certified examples of coins he had designed — beginning with that 2007 Platinum Eagle reverse.

It's a fitting coda for an illustrator. The signature collectors chase on a Cleveland coin is, finally, the same hand that drew it.