News Archive

Notice of Meeting / Oral History Update / New Article (Posted December 2008)

The next meeting of the Medal Collectors of America will be held on Saturday, January 10, 2009, at 12 noon in the Sutton Suite of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, as part of the New York International Numismatic Convention. The MCA meeting will highlight a Panel Discussion on Technology and Numismatics, chaired by John Sallay. All are invited to attend.

The MCA Oral History Project is progressing nicely, thanks to the leadership and efforts of several of our members, in particular, John Sallay, John Adams, Mark Schlepphorst and Dick Johnson. We especially thank Mark Schlepphorst, who has done the bulk of the work of editing and providing the audio files, and Dick Johnson, who has conducted extensive interviews. We now have interviews of John Adams conducted by John Sallay, and of Alan Stahl interviewed by Dick Johnson. We currently are in the process of completing these for publication to our website along with other useful material related to the interviews. A number of other Oral Histories of prominent members of the community of Medallic Art is planned. Anyone interested in conducting such interviews please contact John Sally, Mark Schlepphorst or Ben Weiss. Please stay tuned, as more information about this exciting and informative project will be forthcoming in the weeks and months ahead.

A new article entitled Medallic History of Religious and Racial Intolerance: Medals as instruments for promoting bigotry, by Ben Weiss has been published on the website, www.kunstpedia.com. The article traces the repercussions of religious and racial intolerance through the eyes of historical and commemorative medals.

Upcoming ANA Meeting (Posted July 2008)

Donald Scarinci will be giving a talk at the ANA Meeting in Baltimore entitled, "The ABC's of Art Medal Collecting, What Every Collector Should Know". The presentation is scheduled for Thursday, July 31 at 10:00AM. Donald was also the international guest speaker at the British Art Medal Society (BAMS) annual conference in Newcastle, England, where he gave an illustrated talk entitled, "The Cypress Tree in the Garden, The Empty Cup, and Collecting Contemporary Art Medals."

Ben Weiss will be presenting an exhibit at the ANA meeting in Baltimore entitled, "Medals Struck by the Corporation on London (City of London Medals)". The exhibit will be available for viewing during the entirety of the meeting.

All are invited to attend these events of our MCA members. (See below for more details concerning the ANA meeting.)

Notice of Meeting (Posted June 2008)

The next meeting of the MCA will be held during the ANA convention in Baltimore, Maryland. Our meeting is scheduled on July 31, 2008, at 3 pm in Room 316. Our speaker will be Jim Cheevers, curator at the U.S. Naval Academy Museum. All are invited to attend.

The ANA Convention, World's Fair of Money, will be held July 30 - August 3, 2008 at the Baltimore Convention Center, Baltimore Maryland.

New Feature Added to Website (Posted May 2008)

We have added a new feature to our MCA Website which we have called the Members' Corner.

On this new page we will be posting articles and images and descriptions of the medals that our members wish to share with its readers. Its purpose is to supplement another section on which links to dozens of medal collections from other web sites can be found.

This new feature is limited to current members of the MCA, so any others wishing to post portions of their collection here should consider joining our organization. (An Application Form may be found online at this website).

Our first contribution to this section, generously provided by John Sallay, are images and brief descriptions of his wonderful collection of American School Medals. While mostly from the United States, they cover schools from around the world.

Passing of Samuel Pennington (Posted February 2008)

We note with great sadness the death of Samuel Pennington. Sam was a tireless supporter of numismatics with a particular interest in medals. He ran his own feature, Medals Collector Page of the Maine Antique Digest, and was a regular contributor to several other numismatic ventures on the web and in print. I [Ben Weiss] feel a great personal loss as he was of enormous help in contributing his expertise to our own website. He will be sorely missed.