America’s Most Beautiful Money Goes on Display, With the Original Art Behind It
For coin and currency collectors, the U.S. Treasury has produced far more than money.
For more than two centuries, its artists, engravers, sculptors, and architects helped create many of the images Americans now associate with the nation itself. Liberty. The American eagle. The buffalo. Classical figures of progress and knowledge. Even the words and symbols carried in millions of pockets became part of a much larger visual language.
A new Washington, D.C., exhibition brings many of those objects together.
Shaping American Identity: The Art of the US Department of the Treasury opened September 19, 2026, at the Milken Center for Advancing the American Dream. The free exhibition includes coins, paper money, original artwork, wartime posters, architectural drawings, photographs, and other Treasury-related material rarely displayed together.
For numismatists, however, several objects immediately stand out.
The 1907 Double Eagle Meets the Art That Created It
Among the exhibition’s highlights are examples of the 1907 Saint-Gaudens $20 Double Eagle and the 1935 Buffalo Nickel. Even more importantly, visitors can see plaster and metal casts connected with the work of sculptors Augustus Saint-Gaudens and James Earle Fraser.
That connection between finished coin and original sculpture gives collectors a rare opportunity to see American coinage as art rather than simply as money.
President Theodore Roosevelt launched his famous campaign to improve the artistic quality of American coinage during the early 20th century. In 1905, he turned to Saint-Gaudens, one of America’s leading sculptors.
Roosevelt admired the sculptural power of ancient Greek coins and wanted American money to communicate similar artistic ambition. The collaboration produced Saint-Gaudens’ celebrated $20 gold piece.
Its obverse presents Liberty striding forward with a torch and olive branch. Meanwhile, an eagle flies above the rising sun on the reverse.
The Mint produced several versions during 1907 as officials struggled to translate Saint-Gaudens’ extraordinarily high-relief concept into a coin that could withstand mass production. Approximately 12,000 of the famous High Relief version were struck before the Mint moved to a lower-relief format better suited to everyday coinage.
Today, the Saint-Gaudens Double Eagle remains one of the defining achievements of American numismatic art.
James Earle Fraser’s Buffalo Nickel followed several years later. Introduced in 1913, the design remained in production through 1938. Its Native American portrait and American bison became two of the most recognizable images ever placed on a circulating U.S. coin.
Seeing the coins beside the sculptural material behind them helps reveal something collectors sometimes overlook: these familiar objects began as works of fine art.
The Educational Series Returns to Its Original Paintings
Paper-money collectors may find another section even more compelling.
The exhibition brings together 1896 Educational Series Silver Certificates with paintings by Will H. Low, Edwin H. Blashfield, and Walter Shirlaw connected with the designs used for the notes.
Collectors have long regarded the $1, $2, and $5 Educational Series notes as landmarks of American currency design.
The $1 note depicts History Instructing Youth, with the U.S. Capitol and Washington Monument in the background. The $2 presents Science Presenting Steam and Electricity to Commerce and Manufacture. The $5 uses another elaborate allegorical composition centered on Electricity.
The Smithsonian describes the 1896 issue as a neoclassical series and notes that the three denominations became one of the most popular groups of federal currency.
At the Milken Center, visitors can examine the currency in the context of the artwork that preceded it.
That relationship matters. Before engravers reduced these images to ink, line, and paper, artists conceived them as large-scale compositions. The notes therefore represent far more than an engraving achievement. They show an era when Treasury officials deliberately treated federal currency as a canvas for ambitious American art.
Norman Rockwell, War Bonds, and Art With a Mission
Treasury imagery did not always appear on money.
During both World Wars, the department used posters to encourage Americans to buy government bonds. Artists included James Montgomery Flagg, N.C. Wyeth, Betsy Graves Reyneau, and Norman Rockwell.
One of the exhibition’s best-known pieces comes from Rockwell’s Four Freedoms series.
Rockwell based the paintings on President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s January 6, 1941, address to Congress. Rather than illustrate the ideas through grand historical scenes, Rockwell placed them inside recognizable American life.
His Freedom of Speech, for example, shows a man standing to address his neighbors at a local meeting.
The paintings became enormously successful. A national exhibition tour in 1943 and 1944 helped raise nearly $133 million in war bonds, according to the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum.
Another notable Treasury poster on display dates to 1943.
Keep Us Flying!, created by Betsy Graves Reyneau, features Tuskegee Airman Robert W. Deiz. The Smithsonian identifies the work as a Treasury-commissioned war-bond poster. The National Archives identifies Deiz as a lieutenant in the 99th Pursuit Squadron in connection with the image.
Together, the posters show another side of Treasury art. Instead of decorating coins or bank notes, the images asked Americans to act.
A Six-Foot Treasury Showpiece From the 1893 World’s Fair
One of the largest objects may also be one of the least familiar.
A monumental 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition Presentation Frame greets visitors near the beginning of the exhibition.
The ornate gilded wood and plaster display rises more than six feet and spans nine feet. The Columbus family crest crowns the frame.
Inside are reproductions of bank notes, stamps, and engraved vignettes. Treasury officials created the presentation to demonstrate the quality of American engraving at a time when the nation wanted to showcase its industrial and artistic achievements before an international audience.
For collectors accustomed to studying individual notes or engraved vignettes, the massive frame provides a striking reminder of the prestige once associated with government engraving.
Treasury Artists During the Great Depression
The exhibition moves well beyond coins and currency.
Works by Louis Lozowick, Santos Zingale, and Mitchell Jamieson document American architecture and infrastructure during the Great Depression.
Treasury-administered New Deal art programs employed artists to create works for federal buildings. Those commissions produced murals, paintings, sculptures, and other public art across the country.
The Treasury also had a major role in federal architecture itself. Its Office of the Supervising Architect oversaw a large federal construction program before responsibility moved out of the Treasury Department in 1939. Many surviving courthouses, post offices, and other government buildings still reflect that era.
Historic and contemporary photographs in the exhibition explore that architectural legacy.
More Than Two Centuries of American Visual History
The Milken Center describes Shaping American Identity as the first time this particular group of publicly funded artworks has appeared together.
The exhibition also connects with objects already displayed in the Center’s permanent galleries, including wampum, Civil War currency, and a rai stone.
David Trulio, president of the Milken Center for Advancing the American Dream, said the exhibition demonstrates how Treasury imagery carried recurring American themes across currency, paintings, bond posters, and federal buildings.
That breadth may be the exhibition’s most compelling idea.
Collectors normally encounter a Saint-Gaudens Double Eagle as a coin. They encounter an Educational Series note as currency. A Rockwell image hangs in an art museum. A Treasury mural remains inside a post office.
Here, those objects become chapters of the same story.
The Treasury did not simply manufacture money. Through the Mint, Bureau of Engraving and Printing, government art programs, architecture, and public campaigns, it helped define how generations of Americans saw their country.
Another Exhibition Follows in October
The Milken Center will expand that historical focus on October 2 with another exhibition, Be the People.
Presented by Stand Together, the exhibition will examine moments that influenced concepts of liberty and citizenship in American history. According to the Center, it will include Library of Congress research concerning Thomas Jefferson’s early revisions to the Declaration of Independence.
The Center has also begun hosting U.S. naturalization ceremonies. On September 17, Constitution Day and Citizenship Day, 50 people took part in a citizenship ceremony there.
Visiting Shaping American Identity
Shaping American Identity: The Art of the US Department of the Treasury runs through January 18, 2027, at the Milken Center for Advancing the American Dream, 1503 Pennsylvania Avenue NW in Washington, D.C.
Admission to the exhibition is free, although visitors need tickets. The separate Holodeck Experience costs $15.
The Center operates from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. and closes on Tuesdays and Wednesdays.
For collectors visiting Washington, the exhibition offers something unusual. It places some of America’s most familiar coins and currency back into the artistic world from which they came.
And in the case of the Saint-Gaudens Double Eagle and the Educational Series, that story makes already extraordinary numismatic objects even more interesting.
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