Beth Zaiken

For more than two centuries, the United States has put Liberty on its coins the same way: a woman. Sometimes seated, sometimes striding, sometimes crowned with stars or wrapped in a flag. Beth Zaiken looked at that long tradition and did something almost no one had done. She made Liberty an animal.

On the 2021 American Liberty gold coin, Liberty is a wild American mustang, caught mid-buck, kicking a western saddle off its back. There is no rider — and that absence is the whole point. Zaiken has explained that without a rider in the frame, you stop looking for the person in charge and start identifying with the horse itself: the thing being ridden, refusing to be ridden any longer. The saddle flying loose stands in for the yoke of British rule, thrown off in the Revolution.

Here is the part that makes it click. Zaiken did not come from the world of coins. She is a paleoartist — an illustrator who reconstructs extinct and living animals for museums, the person who paints the mammoth on the wall behind the skeleton. Drawing a horse that moves, that has weight and muscle and fury, is exactly what she does for a living. The Mint hired an animal painter, and she gave them an animal.

The design won Best Gold Coin in the 2022 Coin of the Year awards — the closest thing the field has to an Oscar — announced in early 2023. It was one of her first coins.

Zaiken trained as an illustrator at the Rhode Island School of Design, one of the country's most demanding art schools, and earned a B.F.A. in Illustration. Since 2009 she has been the lead muralist at Blue Rhino Studio in Minneapolis, a fabrication house that builds exhibits for museums, zoos, and cultural centers around the world. Her day job is enormous: large-scale murals and dioramas, prehistoric and modern animals rendered so convincingly that a visitor believes the herd is real.

That background shapes how she thinks about a coin. "I see coins as miniature exhibits you carry in your pocket," she has said — "all are intended to communicate and educate." A mural and a coin face the same problem at opposite scales: you have one image and a few seconds of a stranger's attention, and you have to make it say something true.

Her signature is the living, breathing animal — anatomy you trust, motion you feel. The mustang on the gold coin is not a heraldic emblem standing stiffly in profile. It is a real horse in a real moment, and that realism is what carries the symbolism. She is also careful about meaning. The mustang, she has pointed out, is a fitting stand-in for America itself: horses evolved in North America, vanished, and returned only when Spanish colonists' escaped animals went wild on the plains — at once native and immigrant, exactly like the country.

One thing to be honest about: there is no famous feud here. Some coin artists are remembered as much for fighting the Mint as for their designs. Zaiken's story is the quieter kind — an outside specialist who brought a discipline the Mint did not already have, and whose first major coin walked off with the top prize.