Heidi Wastweet

Heidi Wastweet was born in Redwood City, California, in 1969 and grew up in Idaho. She had no formal art training — she learned by going to museums, reading, and sitting with working artists. Then, in 1987, at eighteen, she walked onto the floor of the Sunshine Minting Company in Coeur d'Alene and started learning the trade hands-on.

She learned it well. Over eleven years she rose to chief engraver — the person responsible for turning a drawing into the steel that strikes a coin. In 1998 she took the same role at the Global Mint in Las Vegas, and in 2001 she opened her own studio, moving it from Idaho to Seattle and finally to the San Francisco Bay.

By her own count she has produced more than a thousand coins, medals, and tokens since 1987 — most of them for private mints, long before her name appeared on anything from the United States Mint. That is the unusual shape of her career: decades of quiet, prolific craft first, official recognition second.

Wastweet works in bas-relief — sculpture that rises only slightly from a flat background, the shallow art form a coin demands. The challenge is brutal: tell a clear, moving story in a circle smaller than a postage stamp, in relief you could measure with a fingernail. Her answer is to design symbolically rather than literally — to find the one image that stands in for the whole idea.

You can see it in her U.S. coins. For the law-enforcement half dollar she didn't carve a police officer; she carved an eye, a magnifying glass, and a fingerprint — the patient, behind-the-scenes work of justice. The idea, not the illustration.

Her path into the U.S. Mint came in two steps. First, service: she spent eight years on the Citizens Coinage Advisory Committee (the CCAC, the panel that reviews proposed coin and medal designs for the Treasury) from 2010 to 2018, and led the American Medallic Sculpture Association as its president. Then, in 2019, she joined the Mint's Artistic Infusion Program — the roster of outside artists the Mint invites to submit designs alongside its own staff sculptors. At the Mint, a design and the sculpture are often two jobs: Wastweet draws the design, and a staff medallic artist sculpts the relief model from it. Her name is the designer; theirs is the sculptor.

2021 National Law Enforcement Memorial half dollar. This was her first design for U.S. circulating-program coinage — the reverse (the "tails" side) of the copper-nickel half dollar. An eye behind a magnifying glass, poised over a fingerprint. It was sculpted by U.S. Mint medallic artist Renata Gordon.

2022 National Purple Heart Hall of Honor silver dollar. A year later she designed both sides of the silver dollar — a rarer credit. The obverse shows the Purple Heart medal itself, flanked by five stars for the five military branches; the reverse shows a nurse in a World War I helmet bandaging a wounded soldier on a stretcher. The obverse was sculpted by Eric David Custer, the reverse by Craig A. Campbell.

For a collector, the names matter: a Wastweet design and a named Mint sculptor are both part of a modern commemorative's provenance, and "designed both sides" is a credit worth noting on the Purple Heart dollar.