Meet the Medalists

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Jamie Franki and Heidi Wastweet are both widely admired, award-winning medal designers. The two tag teamed the ANA’s annual convention medal—and reached new heights of artistic excellence in the process.

An emeritus professor of illustration at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Franki is best known in the numismatic community as the designer of the Bison reverse on the 2005 Westward Journey nickel and the portrait of President Thomas Jefferson that has appeared on the nickel since 2006.

Medal Designers

Wastweet is a leading medallic, bas relief, and monumental sculptor with an extensive body of work. Some of her Liberty-themed art medals are currently on display in Chesterwood, the estate and studio of famed American sculptor Daniel Chester French (who sculpted the Lincoln Memorial statue). Wastweet recently completed a medal for the Medal Collectors of America that is her response to the 1776 Libertas Americana medal and the nation’s semiquincentennial. (Medal Collectors of America members can order Wastweet’s new Libertas medal through the organization.)

Franki has known Wastweet for years and notes that she “taught me the ropes of medallic sculpture. It’s been a long and fruitful collaborative relationship.” Their collaboration began in 2013 when both were on the board of the American Medallic Sculpture Association and teamed up to create the medal for the American Medal of the Year award.

As collaborators and friends, Jamie and I have established a level of trust and understanding.

“As collaborators and friends, Jamie and I have established a level of trust and understanding,” Wastweet says. “He brings his energy and wild imagination while I bring the technical know-how. By ‘technical know-how’ I mean both mechanical and sculptural. I can look at a design and spot where the engravers and die preparers and press operators are going to be cursing our names. I can see where the metal will flow from one side of the medal to the other. I can see where the sculpture texture is going to get lost in the weeds. Jamie knows this about me and heeds my edits without complaint. In return, I never tell him, ‘we can’t do that’—I say, ‘this is how we make that work.’”

2026 World’s Fair of Money Medal

Their latest medal is their most ambitious to date, according to both artists. It features a complex design that resonates strongly with many numismatists by combining aspects of the history of the Lincoln cent with the history of Pittsburgh. Franki prepared a highly detailed design (and numerous other sketches of components of the design). Wastweet, who is among the few medallic artists who still prepares plaster models by hand, then sculpted the design. She said that for her and Franki, “there is a big difference from the industry standard where there is typically an invisible barrier between designer and sculptor. I hope that by spotlighting the success of these collaborations we lift the mysterious divide.”

Below, the artists explain their personal inspirations, their design processes, and their collaborative journey.

In their Words

Jamie Franki

The challenge in designing a successful medal for the ANA’s World’s Fair of Money is finding an intersection between numismatics and the convention host city. One of the ideas I researched was the end of manufacturing 1-cent coins for circulation in 2025. I also considered the steel cents struck during World War II to save copper for munitions, and how Pittsburgh is known for its steel industry. I used the cent coin as a template of sorts to create two sides of the medal employing Victor David Brenner’s cent obverse and the Frank Gasparro reverse to compose ideas about Pittsburgh. The obverse shows steelworkers in action, industrially creating a giant rendition of Brenner’s Lincoln out of welded and riveted sheet metal, with a suggestion of Pittsburgh’s skyline visible in an unfinished area of the epic construction.

For the reverse, I found the historic Duquesne Incline funicular cars fit in beautifully where Gasparro composed the Lincoln Memorial in his new reverse for the cent. Both sides are moored in the concepts of confluence and collaboration. Like the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers wind around Pittsburgh to form the Ohio River, a great surge of numismatic activity will flow into Pittsburgh at the World’s Fair of Money. This convention offers countless opportunities for people to exchange ideas and work together toward shared goals. Every element on both sides contributes toward communicating these core concepts.

There are so many interesting aspects about Pittsburgh and numismatics. It was hard for me to stop exploring topics and making designs! That’s a nice problem to have, but I did wind up spending a lot of time and energy in the development of a portfolio of multiple concepts for the ANA to choose from. When only one concept can be chosen, sadly, other design ideas I really fell for never made it to strike. Such is the nature of how I work together with patrons, offering them a wide spectrum of conceptual art research and development to choose from. In this way, the patron also becomes a critical part of the process, as they choose from my design roughs to select the final concept for finished production.

Heidi Wastweet

For this 2026 ANA medal, we have troves of emails back and forth before I ever picked up clay. Jamie had a stack of great designs before landing on this Lincoln and Duquesne. Ultimately, it was the ANA who narrowed down the overflowing cup of inspiration, and based on the public response so far, they made the right choice! 

On the Lincoln side, there are several challenges [in creating the sculpt]. One is the layering. We strive to make these ANA medals as high relief as we can because we know that’s what the collectors love. More layers mean shallower layers, so it is on me to create the illusion of depth without actual depth. The little windows to the scaffolding in the far background are critical in that illusion. The scaffolding in the foreground was another layer that was demanding because it has to appear in the foreground even when those narrow pipes need to be shallow in order to run over the surface of the large portrait. If you compare the drawing to the medal, you will notice that we made a last-minute decision to cut two pipes that were obscuring the characters.

On the reverse, the Duquesne funicular is bold, while the bridge, city, and mountains all need to recede into the far distance. If I made everything high relief—all the angles, the river, and tresses, and windows, and landscape—the subject would be lost in the cacophony. Instead, I approached it as a still from a Wes Anderson movie. The funicular car is bold while all the background is supporting character energy, shallow and faded. 

The second challenge is the immense detail. Jamie is a stickler for accuracy and detail. I could have put on my magnifiers and put in all the fine lines of his drawing, but the fine detail would be lost in the reduction. Lost detail is no detail. My job then is to distill his drawing to the essence, which is bold and clear on the actual medal. 

The third challenge, which is unique to this project, is to distinguish Lincoln as a sculpture of Lincoln, not Lincoln. Jamie had drawn fabulous texture which I pulled into the sculpture to differentiate the different materials and add more “color.”

Medal Orders

The new medal is so popular with collectors that a second run is now being prepared following the sellout of the initial run of 100 medals. The medals can be pre-ordered until August 28 at 5 p.m. and will ship in October.

During the convention, on August 27 at 1 p.m., Jamie Franki and Heidi Wastweet will give a Money Talks presentation on their work on the 2026 medal.

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