Christopher Polentz

Christopher Polentz spent most of his life on the other side of the frame. He earned a BFA from ArtCenter College of Design in 1985 and a master's in illustration from Syracuse University, then built a long, quiet career: freelance illustration for the entertainment and editorial worlds, decades of teaching, and — from the early 2000s on — his own surreal, faintly unsettling paintings shown in Southern California galleries. Magic realism with a dark edge: exaggerated faces, animals, dream-logic. Not the kind of work you expect to find on legal tender.

Then he applied to the U.S. Mint's Artistic Infusion Program — the AIP, a standing pool of outside artists the Mint draws on to design coins and medals alongside its own staff sculptors. He did not expect to get in. "They accepted me and I was shocked," he told a local news station. By his own count he submitted around twenty designs before any were chosen.

Three eventually made it onto metal. The first two are the front and back of the 2025 American Liberty High Relief Gold Coin — the reason this page exists. Of the work, Polentz was blunt and a little stunned: "It's the best thing I've ever done."

The American Liberty program exists to do one thing: reimagine Liberty for the present day instead of repeating the same classical goddess. Polentz took that mandate literally and strangely. For the obverse — the heads side — he drew a honeybee landing on a sunflower.

The choice is not decoration. The bee pollinating the flower stands for the care and stewardship a free society demands — liberty as something you tend, not something you're handed. And the sunflower itself carries a buried structure most people will never notice: its seed-head follows the Fibonacci sequence, the spiral pattern that governs how a sunflower packs its seeds. Polentz called it "a wonderful hidden representation of the people and government arranged in an organized, harmonious fashion working and growing together." A mathematical order, hidden in plain sight, on a coin about self-government.

The reverse — the tails side — goes the opposite direction. Where the obverse is calm and ordered, Polentz gave the eagle pure motion: a bald eagle caught mid-flight, its wings curving into a swirling, almost vertiginous composition, the head as the eye of the storm. He described it without sentiment: "It's aggressive. It's angular. It's kind of threatening." That is the tension that makes the coin work — order on one face, force on the other, two readings of the same idea.

Designing a coin is not the same as painting one. The Mint's medallic artists translate a designer's drawing into the three-dimensional relief — the raised sculpture that actually strikes into metal — and on a high relief coin that sculpting is the whole point. The reverse eagle was sculpted by Mint Medallic Artist Eric David Custer; the design is Polentz's.