CITE Student Finalist in State Quarter Design Competition

Ken Jones, an ES graduate assistant, is a finalist in the competition to design the obverse of the commemorative state quarter for West Virginia.  His design includes a depiction of the New River Gorge Bridge.  The story below appeared in the Charleston (WV) Gazette on Saturday, June 21, 2003.

5 finalists picked for W.Va. quarter

State's U.S. coin will be minted for issue in 2005

By The Associated Press

Fittingly, for a state fiercely proud of its 140-year-old heritage, family sentiment suffused a Capitol ceremony Friday that unveiled five finalist designs for West Virginia’s upcoming U.S. quarter.

Separate designs by mother-and-son artists, Penny Jo Jones and Kenneth Jones of Barboursville, were among those selected by a 12-person panel of students and introduced by Gov. Bob Wise to celebrate West Virginia Day.

“Oh, love of art definitely runs in the family,” said Penny Jo Jones, 45, an instructor at the Huntington Museum of Art, who travels with her sister, teaching children in the state’s rural counties.

Jones’ design is a quilt, a symbol for her of West Virginians’ ability to unite artistry and self-reliance.

Another finalist, Theodore Trefz, 63, of Weston, used an aging photograph of his mother as a child holding the hand of her aunt as the model for his design, which honors Mother’s Day founder Anna Jarvis, a Grafton native.

The other three designs, those of Kenneth Jones, Jamie Lester of Morgantown and Blake Wheeler of Sumerco, depict the New River Gorge Bridge.

Kenneth Jones, 27, a graduate student in environmental science at Marshall University, worked for about nine months on five ideas.

He finally picked a parachutist leaping from the bridge, “because I felt it most uniquely represented the state. Plus, you have to know your judges, and I felt that 16-year-olds would be inclined to pick something active.”

Judges were high school students who graduated last year from the Governor’s Youth Arts Academy. They did not know the identities of the 50 artists whose work they considered.

Lester, 28, a sculptor who drew a wide-angle view of the bridge framed by woods and water, said other West Virginia locales, such as Blackwater Falls and Seneca Rocks, “were too challenging to boil down to something that would fit on a quarter.”

Wheeler, 21, an art student at West Virginia State College, said he worked for about three hours on his depiction of whitewater rafters beneath the bridge. Wheeler, who has never been rafting, said his biggest challenge was fitting the two images of the state’s tourist industry into the limited space.

The quarter will be available for circulation in 2005. As the 35th state to join the union, in 1863, West Virginia holds that place in line in the series of state commemorative quarters being released. 

The U.S. Mint will review the five designs to ensure each is historically accurate and can be cast into metal. A citizen-review panel and the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts also must assess the designs, and either can narrow the field further.

The secretary of the Treasury must approve the remaining designs. The panel of West Virginia students gets the final say if more than one design remains.

The design contest for the Mountain State’s quarter drew more than 1,800 entries. They ranged from Mothman, a flying creature with red eyes that some residents in the Point Pleasant area reported sighting in the 1960s, to coal mining, the Capitol’s golden dome and a child’s drawing of her house.