Richard Masters

For most of American history, you could not just apply to design a coin. The work went to the Mint's own engraving staff, or, on rare occasions, to a famous sculptor the government courted personally. Then, in 2003, the Mint tried something new. It launched the Artistic Infusion Program — a roster of outside artists, chosen by competition, who would submit designs alongside the in-house engravers. Richard Masters made the first cut. Two decades on, he is the only one of those inaugural members still designing.

He came to it the long way. Born in Sioux City, Iowa, in 1955, Masters earned three degrees — a BA, an MA, and a Master of Fine Arts — from the University of Iowa, then spent his career teaching graphic design at the University of Wisconsin–Oshkosh. He was, in other words, not a coin man. He was a draftsman and a teacher who happened to answer a call for artists.

That outsider's eye is the whole point of the program — and of his work. A coin is a tiny canvas, struck in the millions, that has to read clearly at the size of a fingernail. Masters spent decades making images that reward close looking. Bringing that patience to a circulating coin is a strange, demanding fit, and it is exactly what the Mint was after when it opened the doors in 2004.

Away from the Mint, Masters draws — graphite and colored pencil, worked to an almost photographic finish. His subjects run from nature and architecture to the harder edges of city life, including homelessness. The common thread is patience: dense, painstaking detail built up by hand. His drawings have hung in juried and invited shows around the world and won national honors, among them a top prize from the Allied Artists of America.

A coin design begins as exactly that kind of drawing. In the Artistic Infusion Program, the artist creates the design — the composition, the figure, the idea — but does not cut the metal. A Mint sculptor-engraver translates the drawing into the three-dimensional model from which the dies (the hardened steel stamps that strike the coin) are made. So Masters' coins carry two names: his, for the design, and a sculptor's, for the relief — the raised, sculpted surface you actually feel.

You can see his hand most clearly when the format gives him room. A high-relief coin — one struck so the design stands up dramatically from the field, the flat background — is the closest a modern coin comes to a small sculpture. It is where a detailed draftsman's instincts pay off, and it is where Masters has done his most celebrated Mint work.