Norman E. Nemeth

Norman E. Nemeth did not take the straight road to the Mint. He grew up in Newport News, Virginia, and in 1961 he enlisted in the US Air Force — not as an artist, but as a jet mechanic, servicing aircraft for the Strategic Air Command and the Military Air Transport Service. He was honorably discharged in 1965.

Only then did he turn to art. He enrolled at the Hartford Art School of the University of Hartford, and the work clearly landed: as a student in 1968 he was commissioned to make a sculpture for the school's own permanent collection. He earned his B.F.A. in sculpture in 1969, the same year he won the school's Mitchell Award for Excellence.

What followed was eleven years as a designer-sculptor for the Franklin Mint — the private mint famous for its medals and collectibles — and then more than two decades of freelance work for coin and medal companies, direct-mail marketers, and, unusually, the holographic industry. He modeled coins and medals, yes, but also plaques, toys, porcelain, pewter sculpture, dolls, and masks. By the time he joined the United States Mint as a sculptor-engraver in 2001, he had spent a lifetime learning the one skill the job demands above all: how to make an idea read clearly in a few hundredths of an inch of relief.

Here is a thing most people never think about: the artist who draws a coin is often not the one who carves it. At the Mint, a design might come from an outside artist's sketch — or from the Artistic Infusion Program, the Mint's stable of contract designers — and a staff sculptor-engraver then translates that flat drawing into a three-dimensional model. That model becomes the die, the hardened steel stamp that strikes the coin. Nemeth was a master of that translation.

His talent shows clearest in the 2005 American Bison nickel — the year the buffalo briefly came home to the five-cent piece. The drawing was by Artistic Infusion artist Jamie Franki; the sculpture — the solid, muscular animal standing in profile, every contour reading at coin scale — is Nemeth's. The two men's initials sit on opposite sides of the ground beneath the bison: Franki's on the left, Nemeth's on the right. It is a perfect snapshot of how the modern Mint works, two names, two jobs, one coin.

But Nemeth could carry a design from idea to die entirely on his own — and when he did, he reached for restraint. His coins favor a single human gesture over busy ornament: two hands clasped, a woman bent to her planting. That quiet confidence is the through-line of his best work.

Nemeth's most enduring coin is also one of the quietest. In 2007, Congress passed the Native American $1 Coin Act, which ordered a new reverse every year on the Sacagawea dollar — each one honoring a real contribution of Native peoples. The obverse stayed: Glenna Goodacre's portrait of Sacagawea, the young Lemhi Shoshone woman who traveled with Lewis and Clark, her infant son on her back.

For the very first of these new reverses, in 2009, the Mint chose Nemeth's design — and it is striking how little it shouts. No chief, no eagle, no monument. Instead: a Native American woman bending to plant seeds in a field of corn, beans, and squash. This is the "Three Sisters," an agricultural technique thousands of years old in which the three crops are grown together so each helps the others — corn gives the beans a pole to climb, beans feed the soil, squash shades out weeds. It is one of humanity's oldest and smartest pieces of farming, and Nemeth put it on a coin that still rides in cash drawers across the country. (The 2009 dollar also moved its date and motto to the edge of the coin — the incused lettering you can feel with a fingernail — a change collectors track by its two die positions.)