American Women Quarters Release Dates, Designers and Sculptors

Designer and sculptor are different jobs

Most coin sites credit one name per coin. The Mint credits two, because two people did the work. The designer is an artist from the Mint's Artistic Infusion Program who produces the artwork. The sculptor is a U.S. Mint medallic artist who turns that artwork into the three-dimensional relief that becomes a die.

On three coins in the series the same person did both: Jovita Idár (John P. McGraw), Dr. Mary Edwards Walker and Celia Cruz (both Phebe Hemphill).

Both sets of initials appear on the finished coin. On the 2025 Dr. Vera Rubin reverse you can find CLH for Christina Hess at the lower left and JPM for John P. McGraw at the lower right.

The obverse is one person, on all 20

Every American Women Quarter shares the same obverse: a right-facing portrait of George Washington designed and sculpted by Laura Gardin Fraser. She created it in 1931 for the competition marking Washington's 1932 bicentennial. The Commission of Fine Arts endorsed her design. Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon chose John Flanagan's left-facing portrait instead. Fraser's design waited ninety years.

Fraser was the first woman to design a U.S. commemorative coin, the 1921 Alabama Centennial half dollar. Note that she designed the obverse of these quarters, not the reverse; several published sources, including the old version of this site, have had that backwards.

How a design got chosen

The honorees were not picked by the Mint alone. The Circulating Collectible Coin Redesign Act of 2020 directed the Secretary of the Treasury to consult the Smithsonian Institution American Women's History Initiative, the National Women's History Museum and the Bipartisan Women's Caucus, and the Mint invited the public to submit names. The Act named the fields, "including but not limited to suffrage, civil rights, abolition, government, humanities, science, space, and arts", and said the designs should honor women "from ethnically, racially, and geographically diverse backgrounds". It also barred any portrait of a living person, which is why every honoree in the series had died before her coin was designed.

Once an honoree was selected, Artistic Infusion Program artists submitted candidate designs. Those went to the Citizens Coinage Advisory Committee and the Commission of Fine Arts for review, and the Secretary of the Treasury made the final choice. That is why the reverses vary so much in approach across the series: each one came out of a separate competition.

Release date and when you actually saw the coin

The dates above are the dates the Mint began shipping each design. A coin does not reach your change on its release date. It goes to the Federal Reserve, then to commercial banks as they order coin, then into tills. Several weeks between release and first sighting is normal, and it varies by region depending on which Federal Reserve district is drawing down coin at the time.

This is also why the last coin in the program, Althea Gibson, released on 20 October 2025, was still turning up as new in change well into 2026.

Last verified: October 2026. Mintage figures are final.