Eric David Custer

Reach into your change and you may be holding Eric David Custer's work. The 2026 dime — the one struck for America's 250th birthday — carries an eagle in mid-flight that he designed and sculpted. It is the rare modern circulating coin a working artist can point to and say: that one is mine.

Custer didn't arrive there by the usual path. He grew up in Independence Township, in the rural western corner of Pennsylvania. Before the Mint, he painted automotive murals as a hobby — the airbrushed scenes that turn a car hood into a canvas — and did early engraving work at Wendell August Forge, a Pennsylvania metalware shop famous for hand-hammered aluminum. He studied art at Edinboro University and earned a Bachelor of Science in industrial design from the Art Institute of Pittsburgh in 2006.

That mix — fine art, hands-on metal craft, and the cold discipline of industrial design — turns out to be exactly the toolkit a coin sculptor needs. "Designing and sculpting — they're both problem-solving processes as much as they are art," Custer has said.

He joined the U.S. Mint in 2008. Not as a designer of new coins, but as a product designer on the Design and Engraving team — the person who prepares and restores sculptures so they can actually be manufactured. He spent years adapting and building the Mint's digital sculpting tools, learning the machine side of how a clay idea becomes millions of struck coins. In 2021 he was promoted to medallic artist: one of the small handful of staff sculptors, based in Philadelphia, who model the coins and medals the country carries.

A coin is a brutally small stage. Relief — how far a design rises off the flat field of the coin — has to stay shallow, or the coins won't stack, won't strike cleanly, and won't survive a pocket. Custer's gift is making that thin layer feel deep.

"There's a great challenge in making something in relief like this," he has said. "It's kind of a weird, fascinating challenge to fit everything into that very, very low space we're allowed to sculpt." The trick, in his telling, is a stack of small technical nuances that together create the illusion of depth — coaxing a flat, shallow surface into reading as a living, three-dimensional thing.

Scale changes everything. Medals are larger, so they offer, in his words, a bit more freedom. A quarter or a dime is far harder: the same story has to land in a fraction of the space, under legislated requirements and a production calendar that can give an artist only a couple of weeks per design. Custer works through it the way an industrial designer would — as a problem to be solved — then makes it sing like an artist.

His signature, across the work, is energy. Where another sculptor might pose a static eagle, Custer's birds are caught mid-motion — wings swept, feathers in a swirl, the composition leaning into the moment rather than sitting still. It is the look of someone who learned to paint speed onto the side of a car.