Renata Gordon

Most people who design a U.S. coin never set foot in the Mint. They mail in a drawing and hope. Renata Gordon is one of the few who works inside the building, every day, turning ideas into the metal you can hold.

She grew up in New Jersey and, by her own account, was an artist before she could really talk. "I've been creating artwork since age one and a half," she told the National Endowment for the Arts in 2019. "I don't remember not being an artist." She studied sculpture at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, earning her fine-arts degree in December 2010.

Then came the door that changed her life: an internship at the United States Mint in Philadelphia. She started in March 2011, and the experience landed hard. "When I interned at the Mint, I realized that I was working with some of the best in the world," she said. She stayed — and became one of the Mint's in-house sculptor-engravers, the small team of medallic artists who model the coins and medals the country issues.

It is a strange and old-fashioned job in a digital age. A medallic artist — someone who designs and sculpts the art on coins and medals — has to think in extreme low relief, the shallow raised surface a coin can carry without jamming a stamping press. Gordon does the work that turns a flat drawing into a three-dimensional model the Mint can cut into a die, the hardened steel stamp that strikes the design into a coin blank. Get the relief wrong and the coin won't strike cleanly. Get it right and a banjo seems to lean into the music.

What sets Gordon apart is where she comes from. She is not only a sculptor — she is a painter and illustrator, and she says the two feed each other. While at the Mint she wrote a children's book of poems and illustrated it herself; that side work, she says, "feeds my work at the Mint."

Her process starts not with the chisel but with the eye. "I just look at the image hard," she said of how she approaches a new design. "I really look at it with a discerning eye." That patience shows in the texture of her coins — the flowing water she sculpted into the 2017 Ozark National Scenic Riverways quarter, the tilt of a banjo on the Kentucky dollar that seems to carry rhythm.

She is also clear-eyed about what the work is. The Mint is a factory that makes billions of coins, but Gordon refuses to think of her part as industrial. "If I could only say one thing about the work I do here at the Mint," she said, "I would say to remember that it's in the realm of fine art."

A note on the credits, because they matter to collectors. On most modern U.S. coins, two names appear: a designer who drew it and a sculptor who modeled it for striking. Many of Gordon's best-known coins are ones she sculpted from another artist's drawing — often a drawing by an outside artist in the Mint's Artistic Infusion Program, the pool of freelance artists the Mint commissions designs from. That is not a lesser role. The sculptor decides how the image lives in metal, and it is her initials — RG — that ride alongside the designer's on the coin.