Miley Busiek and the Family of Eagles

In 1980 a sculptor from Texas watched Ronald Reagan accept the Republican nomination and heard him talk about pulling together for the common good. Most people heard a speech. Miley Busiek saw a sculpture.

She decided the right symbol for that idea was not a lone bald eagle — the usual American shorthand for strength — but a family of eagles. A male eagle carrying an olive branch, flying back to a nest where a female eagle waits with their young. Strength, but in service of the next generation. She sketched it, then sculpted it.

Here is the part that makes her unusual. Busiek did not have a coin to put it on. She had a design and a conviction. When she learned the U.S. Treasury was considering a new gold bullion coin, she set out to land the reverse — the "tails" side of the coin — before the coin even existed. She was told the design would have to be approved by Congress, not the Treasury alone. So she went to Congress.

A self-taught artist with no Mint contract lobbied lawmakers, testified at hearings, and gathered letters of support from civic and religious figures and well-known Texans. The campaign ran for years. It paid off in an unusual way: when the Gold Bullion Coin Act of 1985 was signed into law on December 17, 1985, the text itself specified the reverse — "a family of eagles, with the male carrying an olive branch and flying above a nest containing a female eagle and hatchlings." That is Busiek's design, written into federal statute. Her name is not in the law, but the picture is.

Busiek works as a monumental sculptor — bronze, steel, and cast stone, at the scale of public plazas and presidential libraries. That sense of scale shows up in the coin. The Family of Eagles reverse is composed like a small relief sculpture: the male eagle's wings span the upper field, the nest anchors the bottom, and the eye is pulled along the line of the olive branch from one bird to the others. It tells a complete story in the space of a fingertip.

On the finished coin her concept shares the surface with another hand. A coin design and a coin die are not the same thing — turning a drawing into a struck relief is its own discipline. The Family of Eagles was sculpted for coinage by U.S. Mint sculptor-engraver Sherl Joseph Winter, and both artists left their mark: you will find a tiny MB for Busiek and JW for Winter on the reverse. On the other side — the obverse, the "heads" side — is Augustus Saint-Gaudens' striding Liberty, lifted from his celebrated 1907 twenty-dollar gold piece. So the Gold Eagle pairs a turn-of-the-century master with a living sculptor who fought to get there.

Away from coinage, Busiek's public work runs to the patriotic and the heroic: Peace Through Strength, a bronze monument in Arlington, Virginia; the Seal of the President in stainless steel at the George W. Bush Presidential Center in Dallas; and Wild Running Mustangs, a bronze on the campus of Southern Methodist University. Her work has been held by the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, and the University of Texas at Austin. The eagles on the gold coin are, by far, the most reproduced thing she ever made.

For 35 years — from the first coins in 1986 through 2021 — the Family of Eagles was the reverse of the American Gold Eagle. Collectors now call it the "Type 1" reverse, to set it apart from what came after.

In 2021 the Mint replaced it. The new reverse is a tight close-up of a bald eagle's head, designed by Jennie Norris and sculpted by Renata Gordon. Busiek, by then working under the name Miley Tucker-Frost, did not stay quiet about losing the design she had campaigned for. As the redesign was being weighed, she pushed back on the premise that a recognizable, working design needed changing at all.

"If a design is OK, there's no need to change. There are plenty of coins to [change] the designs on."

— Miley Busiek Frost, to Coin World, May 2019

Her view, as she told the same paper, was that the design carried a purpose worth keeping. She even offered a middle path: if the Mint's real concern was security, add anti-counterfeiting features to the existing coin rather than scrap the art. The Mint went its own way. But for a generation of buyers, "the gold eagle" still means her eagles.