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MCA Club Medals

Since 2012, the MCA has issued an annual club medal in silver and bronze which is available for purchase by the members. Club medals to date have been struck in very limited numbers, and the images and mintages for each are given below.

Orders for medals that are still available can be placed online.

2023 MCA Club Medal

The Collectors' Garden
Louisa Sanders, 2024

The bee is a collector of pollen, as well as the producer of honey. Without the bees' contribution to the garden, many flowers would not blossom, and fruit would not grow. There exists a determined and inevitable symbiosis.

The obverse illustrates a swarm of bees collecting pollen from a garden of elegant flowers. I chose each of the flowers because of their meaning according to Victorian Floriography. Zinnias, for example, symbolize everlasting friendship. Apple blossoms indicate preference, daisy references youth, pansy means "you occupy my thoughts", and so on. Combined, these flowers create a bouquet that indicates friendship and new beginnings.

The reverse depicts a noble bee in the honeycomb matrix of his hive with the MCA 2024 inscription encircled by a bough of apple blossoms. I feel that this iconography represents the medal collectors and some of their contributions to the field of medallic art by way of both preservation and enabling new growth.

Title: The Collectors' Garden
Artist: Louisa Sanders
Material: Bronze
Size: 3" (76.2 mm)
Edition: 50

2023 MCA Club Medal

The Fruits of Collecting
Natasha Ratcliffe, 2023

The obverse is a squirrel in a barren landscape dropping an acorn into a hole as clouds roll by. The passage of time happens along the edge; the rain falls from the clouds onto the land, and the seasons pass, leaves falling from the trees down to the same earth. The horizon line is an uninterrupted ribbon around the medal. On the reverse, the same hole erupts with a network of roots and plants under a forest floor. From acorns mighty oaks grow.

A medal to celebrate the fruits of collecting. Single acorns are like a single medal, a seed which may sprout into an oak, splitting off into boughs and branches, and then twigs. New artists found; new links in history made, building a collection is as unique as the growth of a tree. Perhaps to own one is akin to having an acorn; a few, a sapling; many, a tree. Each amount momentous and beautiful in its own right. A room of collectors is like a forest.

A positive message of growth, luck, and fortune, of nature and creatures, of mighty oaks and tiny roots, of the power of transformation. Of the magic of vantage point, as the heavy tree canopy is in fact also light morphing clouds.

Medals are the ability to fit an entire world into your hand.

Title: The Fruits of Collecting
Artist: Natasha Ratcliffe
Material: Bronze
Size: 3" (83 x 81 x 6 mm)
Edition: 50

2022 MCA Club Medal

Origins
Michael Meszaros, 2022

For Renaissance Italy, coinage, which was readily available in considerable numbers, along with many other forms of ancient art, was tangible evidence of the glories of ancient civilizations and a spiritual and ideological inspiration for contemporary artists and collectors. It is this heritage we have chosen as the subject of this year's MCA annual medal. The obverse displays a hand holding a contemporary medal showing a series of adjacent heads each speaking into the ear before it, thus symbolizing the effective role of the medal as a means of communication.

On the reverse, referring to the inspiration of Roman coins for the invention of the modern medal, is a representation of the obverse of one of the most beautiful Roman sestertii shown amidst the dirt and shards of a pot that once contained a buried hoard. The portrait is of Agrippina the Elder (c. 14 BC-33AD). a granddaughter of Emperor Augustus, wife of Germanicus, and mother of Nero and Caligula, during whose reign the coin was minted. On the reverse of the actual coin is a carpentum drawn by mules probably containing the ashes of Agrippina.

Title: Origins
Artist: Michael Meszaros
Date: November 2022
Material: Verbronze (chemically aged solid brass)
Size: 3" (76.2 mm)
Edition: 50

2021 MCA Club Medal

The Octopus
Jeanne Stevens-Sollman, 2021

The Octopus is considered to be the most intelligent of all invertebrates. Not only is it able to escape confinement by squeezing itself through the tiniest of holes, it can also open lidded containers to free its lunch of fish. Possessing nine brains, a mini brain in each of its 8 arms, it tends to harvest or collect treasures, such as empty shells, to hide itself in the crevasses of its rocky undersea home.

Because of these attributes, the octopus was chosen for this year's medal for the Medal Collectors of America. The cephalopod poses on top of an old sea chest filled with coins, as one arm lifts out a special coin, keeping its eye on
the prize.

Title: Eye on the Prize
Edition size: 50
Medium: Bronze
Size: 65mm x 76mm x 10mm
Weight: 222

2020 MCA Club Medal

Raven Steals the Sun: A Collector Enlightens the World

Ravens are the most intelligent of birds. Since biblical times, they have assumed near mythological status in various cultures throughout the world, but nowhere are they more esteemed than with Native American peoples. A legend among the Haida people of the American Northwest tells of a time when the world was cloaked in darkness. The raven, having discovered that the light of the sun had been hidden in a box, tricked the box's owner in order to extract the sun, then flew with it up to the sky, thus lighting the entire world.

Heidi Wastweet, a member of the National Sculpture Society and currently president of the American Medallic Sculpture Society, has created distinguished bas relief sculptures in both medallic and monumental form. Given the raven's reputation for being attracted to shiny objects, she has chosen to base a remarkable and unique new conception, her design for the Medal Collectors of America's 2020 Annual Medal, on the legend of the raven as the bringer of light. Setting animated perspectives of this central character against backgrounds of decorative Haida patterning and the brilliance of the sun, she has sculpted a composition both artful and dramatic. The parallelism between the raven’s intelligent purposes and behaviors and those of scholarly medal collectors make this extraordinary medal particularly apt as the ninth in an ongoing series of Annual Medals to be issued by the Medal Collectors of America.

Mintages:
Silver: 25
Bronze: 50

2019 MCA Club Medal

The Native American Indian is an iconic figure of near mythical significance in the history of the United States. Male warriors in particular have long been associated with the characteristics of dignity, courage, and loyalty to tradition that, somewhat paradoxically, are understood both as timeless virtues and as values somehow now irrevocably associated with a past age. The eminent sculptor and medalist, Eugene Daub, a former president of the National Sculpture Society, has managed to capture the solemnity and pathos of the proud Native American, an at once handsome and virile figure but also a man thoughtful and thus aware that his people's hegemony over the expanse of the Great Plains is about to decline. On the medal’s obverse an eagle’s feathers, personally gathered from a nest high upon a cliff to prove his bravery, still adorn the warrior's noble brow even as the Indian Peace medal that hangs on a cord around his neck symbolizes an evanescent hope of equality with, and equity at the hands of, the advancing white man. The gaze of the Indian brave astride his mount on the medal’s reverse side, armed either for the life-sustaining hunt, or for the fatal conflict, still commands the endless windswept grassland and the distant hills under a cloudy sky. This medal has two faces both of which convey something ineffable of the past, present and future that this heroic figure and his race is forced to contemplate.

Mintages:
Silver: 25
Bronze: 40