No Small Change at the Mint

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© COINage Magazine, 2006. Reprinted from November 2006 issue with permission. All rights preserved
John Mercanti
Heads Up The
Creative Team
by Leon Worden
is co-workers call him “Chief,” but
that isn’t his title. There hasn’t officially been a chief sculptor-engraver at
the U.S. Mint since the last one left in
1990, and the Mint isn’t likely to resurrect
the position.
The handwritten name card at the U.S.
Mint booth at the American Numismatic
Association’s summer convention, held
this August in Denver, identified him
as “head engraver,” but that isn’t
his title, either. He does more
than heads. He also does necks,
torsos and a few other things.
John Mercanti’s new title is
a mouthful: supervisory
design and master tooling specialist. It understates his role
as the man in charge of the
small staff of artisans who create the images on the nation’s
coinage. And yet, his title hints at
the changes underway in the secret
laboratory in Philadelphia where the
latest congressional mandates are
brought to life.
This change isn’t nickel-and-dime stuff.
Mercanti is bringing the sculpting and
engraving division into the future one
baby step at a time. He is transitioning it
from plaster and clay to virtual reality, in
which models are made from ones and
zeros by digital artists using touchenabled computer interfaces that make it
seem they’re sculpting in the physical
world.
“This is not the Mint that I came to 30some years ago,” said Mercanti, who was
hired by then-Chief Engraver Frank
Gasparro in 1974 after a tour of duty as
a Defense Department illustrator. “I like
to think of myself as leading the first new
division of the 21st century, because the
old chief engraver position doesn’t exist.
It doesn’t even apply to this position anymore.
www.coinagemag.com
John Mercanti talks to ANACS President James
Taylor at the 2006 ANA convention in Denver.
“In the old days,” Mercanti said,
“the chief engraver did all of the
designs.” Gasparro’s underlings “were
lucky to get a reverse.”
It was a slower time. Longtime hobbyists remember all too clearly that
Congress rarely revitalized the nation’s
coinage in the 1970s. Changes were
authorized so infrequently that sculptors
had the luxury of spending months on a
single design.
The pace started to pick up for the
engraving staff when commemorative
half dollars made their return in 1982.
Then came new, multidenomination coin
series for collectors and new bullion products in silver and gold for investors.
Throughout the 1980s, Chief Engraver
John Mercanti designed the 2006 Buffalo
gold bullion $50 coin using FreeForm.
Elizabeth Jones would parcel out the
design work to her staff.
Hobbyists’ dreams really came true in
1999 with the debut of new designs for
circulating coins. But creating five new
reverses for Washington quarters each
year meant some things needed to change
LEON WORDEN; U.S. MINT
© COINage Magazine, 2006. Reprinted with permission. All rights preserved
H
SENSABLE TECHNOLOGIES
SensAble Technologies' patented Phantom haptic interface gives the FreeForm software user the
feel of molding real clay, whether the artist is designing a coin or a car seat.
The toolbar of SensAble's FreeForm
Modeling Plus system.
at the Philadelphia Mint—both in the
number of coin artists and in the way
they practiced their craft.
Rather than expand the in-house
engraving staff, the Treasury Department
began aggressively soliciting help from
outside artists in 2003, when it launched
the Artistic Infusion Program (AIP) “to
enrich and invigorate the design of
United States coins and medals.”
Then in 2004, in hopes of speeding up
the design process, it awarded a solesource contract for a digital modeling
package to SensAble Technologies of
Woburn, Massachusetts. According to
the Treasury’s procurement documents,
SensAble’s Freeform Modeling Plus system “enables users to produce coin
designs on a computer screen, where the
images can then be saved and forwarded
to a CNC [computerized numerical control] machine, which then creates the die.”
Actually, Mercanti isn’t sending
designs from FreeForm to a machine that
cuts the dies. From FreeForm, he exports
them to a machine that creates the master
hub, which is used to make production
hubs, which are used to make the individual dies. But going directly from desktop
to die could be just around the corner.
“I have done some experiments with
cutting a die directly, but that’s as far as I
have gone,” Mercanti said. “They have
done it in Europe for years. They call it a
master punch. Why we do hubbing this
way, I don’t know. It’s the way we have
always done it.”
To Mercanti, that is no longer a valid
reason.
“We’re in a research-and-development phase right now,” he said. “I am
trying to streamline the process and
make the product-to-market time a lot
shorter.”
He will have to. Maybe it’s a lesson in
being careful what you wish for, but
Congress took hobbyists’ dreams of
new coin designs to nightmarish levels
when it approved the presidential dollar
series—four new circulating coins each
year that aren’t likely to circulate, beginning in January 2007—together with
their companion first spouse medals in
gold. In addition, four different Lincoln
cent designs are on the drawing board
for 2009.
Already in the bank are five Jefferson
nickel redesigns since 2004 and the .9999fine American Buffalo one-ounce gold
bullion coin. And every year brings new
platinum issues, two commemorative programs, two 3-inch medals, and, through
2008, five new statehood quarters.
“Right now, we’re in the busiest time
ever,” Mercanti said. “Some of these
programs just drop in on you. You’ve
got to make room for them, so that’s
what we do. We need the technology
that will aid us in moving these things
along. Once we get this flowing on an
even keel, we’ll be fine. That’s the key to
it: time management.”
Mercanti is managing a staff of relative newcomers. He has more than a
quarter-century on the Mint’s secondlongest-tenured sculptor, Norman Nemeth, who came on board in 2001. As
a result, Mercanti holds all the institutional memory.
“I feel like I am the link between
Gasparro and [John] Sinnock and
[Gilroy] Roberts into the new 21st-century technology,” he remarked.
continued on next page
Sinnock was chief engraver from to
1925 to 1947. Roberts, designer of the
Kennedy half dollar obverse (with the
reverse by Gasparro), followed him in
1948, leaving in 1964 to join the private
Franklin Mint.
Nemeth, like fellow U.S. Mint sculptors Don Everhart and Charles L.
Vickers, worked at The Franklin Mint
at a time when it was producing
medals and foreign coins that often
outshone U.S. government issues.
“I have a staff now that is, in my
opinion, the best staff in the world,”
Mercanti said. “Don Everhart is probably the fastest sculptor I know. He
can knock out a model in no time.
Charlie Vickers is absolutely incredible. Norman Nemeth can replicate
everything I give him.”
Joseph Menna, hired in 2005, is a
sculptor who learned his skills in
Russia and in Philadelphia. “He just
blows you away,” Mercanti said. Phebe
Hemphill, a new hire this year, “came
from the toy industry. She is one of the
most amazing sculptors I have ever
seen.” Rounding out the design staff is
a classically trained digital sculptor
who was in the process of being hired
in mid-August.
Mercanti will need to rely on his
small crew to pull off the miracle of
the 2006 San Francisco commemoratives. Congress authorized two coins—
a silver dollar and a half eagle ($5 gold
piece)—to honor the Old San
Francisco Mint and its role in San
Francisco’s recovery from the great
earthquake of 1906, but the coins are
being issued late this year under heavy
deadline pressure.
Treasury Secretary Henry M.
Paulson Jr. didn’t approve the designs
until Aug. 3, following a mix-up
involving the recipient organization
(surcharges will help finance construction of a money museum inside the
former Mint building). Under congressional mandate, all the coins must be
sold before year’s end, and the Mint’s
marketing department is crossing its
fingers that they’ll be available by
December.
“It’s faster than any commemorative
program that we have every done,” said
Mint spokesman Michael White.
But buyers needn’t fear an inferior
product.
“The design itself never suffers,”
Mercanti said, “because these people
are professionals. They can put a
design together that works, and works
beautifully, very quickly.”
He said it helps to have a close working relationship with the Mint’s marketing division.
www.coinagemag.com
from page 35
A screenshot of SensAble Technologies' FreeForm Modeling Plus system shows a raptor being
designed.
“We work in partnership,” he said.
“Those people are on the ball and they
know how to space these things out.”
“My group probably talks to John
on a daily basis, if not multiple times a
day,” said Gloria Eskridge, associate
director of sales and marketing for the
Mint. “It really is a team. We’ve always
tried to work really closely with manufacturing because, after all, we only
sell. They have to make.”
So, does Mercanti ever balk?
“We have lively discussions,”
Eskridge said with a smile. “You have
to push the limits. But he’s been very
good. He is really looking after the
interests of the Mint and the collector,
because they ultimately are very
important.”
While the official position of chief
engraver has faded into obsolescence,
Mercanti’s new role restores the tradition of having a coin artist in a supervisory capacity. After Elizabeth Jones
left in 1990, the artisans and machinists in the engraving division were
overseen by an engineer, not a coin
designer.
“We always had a real good working
relationship with the engravers, because
they were the ultimate endgame,” said
Eskridge. “We’re really glad that
[Mercanti’s] position is there and that
John is in it.”
Bill Fivaz, a member of the Citizens
Coinage Advisory Committee, one of
two government panels that review all
new coin designs, believes it’s best to
Sculpting is something Mercanti does at
home, on the side.
have someone with hands-on knowledge overseeing the other artists.
Mercanti “does spectacular work,”
Fivaz said. “He is very conscious of
the proper designs and elements, and I
think there couldn’t have been a better
selection.”
“He is going to be mentoring several people I know who will be studying
under him, and I think that’s a big, big
plus,” said Fivaz, known to collectors
as co-author (with J.T. Stanton) of The
Cherrypickers’ Guide to Rare Die
Varieties.
Early next year, Mercanti will raise
his mentoring role to a new level when
he takes six college- and graduate-level
SENSABLE TECHNOLOGIES; LEON WORDEN
© COINage Magazine, 2006. Reprinted with permission. All rights preserved
No Small Change At The Mint
art students under his wing. Through
Oct. 16, the Mint was accepting applications for participation in a threeweek internship in Philadelphia.
“We’ve revamped the program,”
Mint spokeswoman Cynthia Meals
told the citizens’ committee at its meeting in August. Selected art students
“will work directly with John Mercanti
and his staff to … learn how line art
and drawing can be translated into
sculpture.
“We’re going to try to build a curriculum with our internship so that
they can go back to their universities
and get independent study credit for it,
as well,” she said. “It helps in their
education and helps us mentor the
coin artists of the future.”
Meals said applicants were being
solicited from “the top drawing and
visual arts schools in the country,”
with special attention to cultural diversity.
Mercanti is hopeful some of the students will be inspired to make a career
of it.
“It’s a good way to set up a system
where you have a group of people
ready to move in and take the place of
the people who are leaving—because
we’re not all very young people.”
Mercanti, 63, has no plans to retire.
He is quick to point out that several
predecessors were still working at an
advanced age. Jocular about his own
age, he quips that Felix Schlag (18911974), designer of the Jefferson nickel,
was “one of my best friends.”
In truth, Mercanti might have been
a talented illustrator, but he knew little
about sculpture when an apprenticeship position opened up at the Mint in
the year of Schlag’s death.
He remembers: “When I applied for
this job, Gasparro said, ‘Did you ever
sculpt anything?’ I said no. So he said
to do something and bring it in tomorrow. I had a piece of round wood and
a book on Michelangelo and took one
of his paintings and replicated it.
“As soon as I started modeling it, I
said, this is my life. It was just one of
those things. It was like finding the
love of your life. You look into her
eyes and you say, this is the woman I
am going to spend the rest of my life
with.” Mercanti said his wife,
MariAnne, “understands that this is
my mistress. She knows, but it’s a tolerable mistress.”
Gasparro sent Mercanti to school to
learn the basics, but it was the opportunity to apprentice under “some of
the best portrait artists who were
around at the time” that turned him
into a coin artist.
“Schools actually don’t teach this,” he
said. “This is something you learn in the
field. You learn by doing. You learn by
apprenticing.”
The gradual transition to a digital
modeling platform doesn’t obviate the
need for classical training, Mercanti
said, although he is calling his designers “medallic artists” rather than
“engravers” in recognition of the
diverse array of tools they use.
Computer programs can do some cool
things, he said, but ultimately they are
just one type of tool among many—a
means to an end in the consumer’s
pocket.
“You have to have classical training as
an artist,” Mercanti said. “People have
to know the anatomy of the face. They
have to know which muscles work on
other muscles, and why people smile.
“I have an anatomical figure in my
office that shows all the muscles. My
people are constantly looking through
anatomy books. There is a great deal of
time and effort that goes into this art
form.”
No matter what tool is being used.
Sometimes the most efficient
method involves the use of an oldfashioned plaster model, as when historic designs are revived for use on new
coins. For instance, when Mercanti
enhanced the back of the Jefferson
nickel to create the 2006 “Return to
Monticello” reverse, “I went into the
vault and got the artist’s original
model and added the detail where it
could be added.”
Other times, no original two-dimensional artwork exists to load into a computer and make 3D. That was the case
with the reverse of the San Francisco
Mint silver dollar, which replicates a 1904
version of George T. Morgan’s silverdollar eagle, and the San Francisco half
eagle, which uses the reverse of the 1906
Liberty Head half eagle by Christian
Gobrecht. They are being resculpted in
plaster to mimic the originals as closely as
possible.
The reuse of James Earle Fraser’s
Buffalo nickel designs on the 2006
American Buffalo gold bullion coin
presented a different challenge. Fraser
had created a textured field. It wasn’t
meant to be smooth, as is the area
between the designs and lettering on
most coins. The truest way to replicate
it was on a computer.
“In the old days, and in fact when I
first came to the Mint, we would sculpt
the basins by hand,” Mercanti said.
The basin is just that: the round, flat
starting point when sculpting a coin or
medal. “It was a long process. When
Fraser did his model, he actually had a
hand-sculpted basin that was never
really smoothed out.”
With FreeForm, all it takes to create
a perfect basin is a click of the mouse.
Mercanti took Fraser’s original 4inch plaster model “and scanned it
into our machines. We establish this
perfect basin and then literally pick up
the artwork off the bed of the scanner
and move it onto this perfect basin.”
FreeForm then digitally reconstructed Fraser’s original design, rough
fields and all. His rough-hewn backgrounds couldn’t have been replicated
precisely by hand.
The Mint’s first all-digital issue was
a medal honoring former Mint
Director Henrietta Holsman Fore,
who “was very proud of the fact that
we did that digitally,” Mercanti said.
The first all-digital coin with brandnew designs, as opposed to historic
redesigns, will be next year’s commemorative dollar marking the 50th
anniversary of desegregation at Little
Rock Central High School in
Arkansas.
Mercanti said he could have shaved
two days off the production time for civil
rights activist Dorothy Height’s congressional gold medal in 2004 if he had been
able to use FreeForm. As it was, he
turned it around in only nine days.
“The Dorothy Height medal had an
amazing amount of text cut into the
reverse, which I had to cut in by hand,”
he said. “Now we can generate all of
that digitally.
“That in itself is a major step forward,” he said. “When we used to
make a drawing 20 years ago, we lettered in the drawing, and if we had to
adjust the portrait to fit the lettering,
we’d have to go back and make a new
drawing. Now the text is generated
separately and the image is generated
separately. We can actually move the
text around and move the image
around and change the size and
ratios.”
Moving things around, streamlining
processes without sacrificing artistic
integrity, meeting shorter and shorter
deadlines, experimenting with new
technologies, coaching outside artists,
mentoring art students, supervising
machinists—and all the while trying to
satisfy collectors and produce pleasing
coin designs for the American public.
It’s little wonder his subordinates call
Mercanti “Chief,” even if the Treasury
Department doesn’t.
“We’re moving at an incredible pace,
that’s all I can say,” Mercanti said.
“We’re doing designs for next year, so
we’re ahead of the game. And we’re
trying to keep it that way.”