Justin Kunz: from World of Warcraft to Lady Liberty

In 2003, a 29-year-old game-studio artist named Justin Kunz joined a small group of outside artists the U.S. Mint had invited in to shake up its coin designs — the Artistic Infusion Program. He was one of the youngest in the room. He was also about to spend five years losing.

Kunz submitted design after design. Many made it to the finalist round — past the Mint's own review, the citizens' advisory committee, the Commission of Fine Arts. None got chosen. Year after year, so close, then nothing. He went to John Mercanti, the Mint's chief sculptor-engraver and the most prolific coin designer in its history, and told him how frustrated he was.

Mercanti's answer was simple. In Kunz's own telling, the engraver told him "you're doing great work. You just need to keep at it." So he did. The next round, the Mint picked one of his designs — the reverse of the 2008 Andrew Jackson Liberty First Spouse gold coin. The drought was over.

That single piece of advice sits behind one of the most recognizable runs of modern American coinage. The lesson Kunz took from it — keep submitting, keep absorbing the feedback — is the quiet engine behind everything that followed.

Kunz did not come up through engraving. He came up through pictures — illustration first, then painting, then the strange, demanding craft of designing in metal.

He earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in illustration from Brigham Young University (1999) and later a Master of Fine Arts in painting from the Laguna College of Art and Design (2011), studying under a roster of respected realist painters including Jeremy Lipking, Jon Swihart, and John Nava. For most of the 2000s, though, his day job was video games. He built worlds for LEGO's Bionicle, for Disney's Chicken Little and Meet the Robinsons, and — as a senior 3D environment artist at Blizzard Entertainment — for the outdoor landscapes of World of Warcraft and early concept work on Overwatch.

That background shows in his coins. A coin is a tiny, crowded stage, and the heads side — the obverse — has to read instantly: a single figure, a clear silhouette, a feeling. Kunz designs like a storyteller staging a frame, then translates it into relief — the sculpted rise and fall of the metal that catches light. His own statement of purpose is plain: he wants "to create pictures that tell great stories with imagination, and express the extraordinary beauty I see in this world."

His best-known commission asked exactly that of him. For the 2015 American Liberty gold coin, he says, "the task that we were given by the Mint was to portray Liberty in a modern way, a new way. What that meant, they didn't really tell us. It was open for us to interpret." He gave them a Liberty standing forward, crowned with a wreath, a torch in one hand and the flag in the other — courage and hope rendered in 24-karat gold. Two years later he pushed further: for the 2017 American Liberty 225th Anniversary coin, marking the Mint's own 225 years, his Liberty appeared as a youthful African-American woman in a crown of stars — the first time Liberty had been portrayed that way on a U.S. coin. It drew real debate in the collecting world. It also won Best Gold Coin in the 2019 Coin of the Year Awards.

Today Kunz is an associate professor of illustration at BYU and works from the foothills of Mt. Timpanogos in Utah, still designing for the Mint between paintings and classes.