Patricia Lewis Verani

Patricia Lewis Verani was a sculptor first, and a coin designer because the U.S. Mint came looking for sculptors.

She was born Patricia Lewis on Long Island, New York, on January 2, 1927, and trained at the Boston School of Fine Arts. An art scholarship took her to Italy — the country where sculpture is practically a native tongue — and there she met Osvaldo Verani. They married, lived in Italy, and later settled in the United States, in Londonderry, New Hampshire.

Her medium was the chisel, not the coining press. She carved in clay, stone, and wood, and her public work still stands where she left it: the Fighting Black Bear at the University of Maine, The Minute Men on the Londonderry Commons, a Johnny Appleseed at the town's Leach Library, a Nurse and Child in the garden at Boston Children's Hospital. A coin, for a carver, is just sculpture at its smallest and most demanding scale — every line has to survive being shrunk to the width of a few millimeters and stamped into metal millions of times.

She died on December 15, 2017, in Manchester, New Hampshire, at the age of 90.

Verani belonged to a particular tradition: the American medallic sculptor. These were artists who worked the small round canvas of the medal and the coin, where the whole story has to be told in low relief — the shallow raised modeling that catches light on a metal surface.

That world recognized her. The Society of Medalists, the country's premier medal-art series, issued her two-sided bronze Snow and Sand as issue No. 118, struck by the Medallic Art Company — an Inuit hunter and dogsled on one face, an Arab rider and camels on the other. In 1992 she won the competition to design the National Sculpture Society's Centenary Medal, a Janus-faced bust marking the society's hundredth year. Winning that commission put her name alongside the established medalists who had shaped the field.

Her coin work shows the carver's instinct for a single, legible idea. On the 1987 Constitution dollar she resisted the temptation to crowd the field — the obverse, the heads side, is just a sheaf of parchment, a quill pen, and three words. On the 1988 Olympic dollar she reached for a human gesture instead of a stadium scene: a hand holding the Statue of Liberty's torch. The discipline is the point. A coin design that tries to say everything ends up saying nothing once it's the size of a thumbnail.

Verani's coins came out of the boom in modern U.S. commemoratives — special coins Congress authorizes to mark an anniversary, with surcharges that fund a cause. Across roughly a decade she designed the obverse of four of them.

The 1987 Constitution Bicentennial silver dollar is the one most fully hers — she designed both sides. The obverse pairs a quill and a sheaf of parchment with the opening words of the Constitution, "We the People." The reverse gathers a cross-section of Americans from different eras of the nation's history.

For the 1988 Olympic silver dollar, honoring the U.S. team at the Seoul Games, she designed the obverse: a hand raising the Statue of Liberty's torch, joining the two flames of liberty and the Olympics. (The reverse, the Olympic rings, was the work of Mint sculptor Sherl J. Winter.)

The 1989 Congress Bicentennial half dollar carries her bust of the Statue of Freedom — the figure that crowns the U.S. Capitol dome — on its obverse.

And for the 1996 Atlanta Olympics $5 gold coin, part of the sprawling Centennial Games program, she designed the Flag Bearer obverse: an American athlete carrying the flag into the stadium. It became one of the rarest modern U.S. commemoratives — its uncirculated version had a tiny mintage, just under ten thousand pieces.