Jack Daws's Golden Penny

A couple of years ago Jack Daws, a Seattle artist, made ten copies of a penny (each using about $100 worth of gold). Daws put a patina on the pennies, so their shiny gold color would be masked, and used one to buy a Hustler at LAX. Daws assumed this circulated penny would be lost forever. But Jessica Reed, a Brooklyn artist, found it.

As reported on the NY Times website:

Late this summer, when Ms. Reed was paying for groceries at the C-Town supermarket in Greenpoint, she noticed the penny because the gold color had started to peek through. A fan of unusual coins, she slipped it back into her change purse and tucked it into the recesses of her mind.

Then recently, while doing research about a 1924 Mercury-head dime, she remembered the penny and typed "gold penny" into Google, which returned information on science experiments to give a penny a gold color. She added "1970" and found an item about how Mr. Daws had put a 18-karat gold penny, dated 1970 with no mint mark, into circulation. It was heavier and smaller than a real penny.

In disbelief, she weighed the penny on a digital scale. It came in at three grams, one gram more than similar pennies from 1970. And it was slightly smaller than a normal penny, owing to the shrinking after the casting process.

She traced Mr. Daws's phone number through the gallery and left him the message. When he called back, he knew it had to be his penny as soon as she described it to him.

Ms. Reed will keep the coin. She is thinking of having it framed. It's was a curious way to display a sculpture, she said. "I can’t imagine being an artist who does something like this," she said. "It's the opposite of having your stuff shown in a gallery. It could be tossed."

Coincidentally the day before reading about this, I found myself contemplating a 1970 penny that I received as change. Hmm... I wonder where it went?

[via Jennifer Lee @ NY Times City Room blog]