Marika Somogyi

Marika Somogyi was born in Budapest in 1933, into a wealthy Hungarian Jewish family — which, in the Hungary of her childhood, was a dangerous thing to be. During the Second World War she survived by hiding in a Catholic convent under a false identity, one of the countless small disappearances that kept Hungarian Jews alive while their world came apart.

She married young, at seventeen. Then history came for her a second time. When the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 was crushed by Soviet troops, Somogyi and her husband, László, joined the wave of refugees pouring west, and made their way to the United States.

That double escape — from one regime, then another — is the quiet engine behind everything she made. She became a sculptor and a medalist, an artist who works in the demanding miniature scale of coins and medals. And when she put a memorial in metal, she had earned the right to.

Somogyi trained as an artist twice. First at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts in Budapest, the academy at the center of the country's art world. Then again in America, at the University of California, Davis, where she studied under the ceramic sculptor Robert Arneson — a giant of the irreverent "Funk" movement of the California art scene. She went on to lecture at Pennsylvania State University.

Her range was wide and a little wonderful. She made memorial medals of real moral weight — a 1982 medal for the Judah L. Magnes Museum honoring Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who saved tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews, the very people Somogyi had once been hidden among. She made a medal for the clarinetist Benny Goodman. And, at the other end of the spectrum, she made the playful pins that the comedian Robin Williams wore on his suspenders as Mork in the sitcom Mork & Mindy.

But for coin collectors, her name attaches to two pieces. In both, she designed the obverse — the "heads" side, the face of the coin — while the U.S. Mint's own staff engravers handled the reverse.

The first was the 1991 Mount Rushmore Golden Anniversary silver dollar, struck for the memorial's 50th birthday. Somogyi's obverse gives you the mountain itself — the four carved presidents, Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt, and Lincoln, gazing out. The reverse, the Great Seal of the United States over a map marked "Shrine of Democracy," was the work of Frank Gasparro, the Mint's former Chief Engraver. The Mint's Chester Y. Martin prepared the final sculpted model of her design.

A decade later came the 2001 Capitol Visitor Center silver dollar. Here Somogyi did something subtle: her obverse layers the small, original 1800 Capitol over the grand building of 2001 — two centuries of the same place in a single image. The reverse, an eagle wrapped in a banner reading "U.S. CAPITOL VISITOR CENTER," was designed by John Mercanti, who would later become the Mint's 12th Chief Engraver.