THE FIDEM 2007 CONGRESS MEDAL BY SARAH PETERS

The most under-reported medal in the last decade is the 2007 FIDEM Congress Medal issued by the American Numismatic Association. I mentioned this medal in last week’s E-Sylum article on new coin and medal concepts. I was not entirely clear about what I said, realizing this after it was published Monday morning

This week I contacted the artist, Sarah Peters, to learn the facts, resolving to pass on more accurate information. We had met at the FIDEM Congress in Colorado Springs in September 2007. Later she accepted my invitation to come to Connecticut to do a plant tour at Greco Industries in Bethel where the discussion was extensive on medal patinas, the firm’s specialty.

In 2006 FIDEM had issued an invitation for their 30th Congress to world medallists to prepare their medal designs with the theme of Reconstruction following Katrina and other recent disasters The medallic items would be exhibited in Colorado Springs at ANA headquarters.

Sarah Peters was one of 31 American artists who accepted that challenge. She made sketches developing concepts for her proposed medal. She wanted a unique design within the prescribed theme. Her final choice was a brilliant concept of a man on one side, a woman on the other, but designed in an arc shape where four quadrant shapes would interlock completing a circle made of the four separate medals.

Working first with paper patterns she enlisted the aid of her husband Donald, a mechanical engineer. By waterjet he cut four patterns exact shape in sheet aluminum. These fit perfectly when interlocked together proving her concept allowing a small tolerance between the pieces.

The patterns were the exact size of the intended medal. But a relief model required a size four times larger to be reduced pantographically at Medalcraft, the firm the sponsoring ANA had selected to make the medals. She prepared plaster models the necessary size for submission to Medalcraft in Wisconsin.

She describes the obverse male side as a construction worker in hard hat with hammer in one hand, nail in the other. The FIDEM lettered inscription is, in effect, the worker’s tool belt. When the four medals are placed with all four male sides showing, this forms a center open work. The worker is hammering new construction symbolized in this area adhering to the prescribed FIDEM theme.

The reverse shows a female with a basket of seedlings. She is planting these in the area of the open work, symbolizing a reseeding as part of reconstruction. Seedlings are shown at her feet and also growing out of the open area.

This was such a brilliant, dramatic concept in medallic art that the artist and the ANA as sponsor, are both to be commended. It was an honor extended to FIDEM forming, perhaps, the most significant Congress Medal ever issued in FIDEM’s thirty years of medals in this series. More than just an art medal Sarah Peters’ creation was an outstanding medallic object in the true definition of the term.

The medal in a group of four is certainly a showpiece. I couldn’t wait to acquire a set of four when I attended the 2007 FIDEM Congress. I exhibited them recently to a group of collectors, sculptors and the public. Everyone, after I mentioned they can be rearranged, had to do exactly that – make each of the four different configurations illustrated here.

But what of Sarah Peters? Did it bring her fame and fortune as it should have? The ANA did pay her expenses to attend the FIDEM Colorado Springs Congress, but no other fee. Her fantastic medallic creation went unreported. It should have been trumpeted in all the art and numismatic press!

To read the earlier E-Sylum article, see:
NEW CONCEPTS IN COINS AND MEDALS: FAD OR FASHION? (www.coinbooks.org/esylum_v18n42a23.html)

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