These works of art are literally made of money, yet worth more than the sum of their parts – but do they support or negate the argument that coins should be obsolete as currency? Artists use pennies, nickels, half dollars, Eurocents and other coins to craft murals, mosaics, sculptural busts and benches, or just carve into their faces, modifying them into pop culture icons like Frankenstein and E.T.

Hand-Engraved Coins by Shaun Hughes

UK-based engraver Shaun Hughes etches decorative designs onto coin faces, embellishing therewith curlicue and floral patterns or adding flowing hair.

Hobo Nickels by Paolo Curcio

Following in the hobo nickel tradition, an inexpensive and highly portable art form involving the modificationn of coins, artist Paolo Curcio adorns a variety of coins with pop culture imagery, skulls and more, including the heads of clowns, Frankenstein and E.T.

Geometric Coin Sculptures by Robert Wechsler

Artist Robert Wechsler cuts slits into coins that enable him to build complex three-dimensional sculptures, including a series for The New Yorker. The sculptures can consist of as few as four coins, up into the thousands.

Welded Euro Sculptures by Gabriel Rufete

Whether stacked on top of each other or welded at their edges, coins provide the basis for surprisingly detailed sculptures of human forms by Gabriel Rufete.

Next Page - Click Below to Read More:
Creative Currency 33 Sculptural Works Of Art Made From Coins

The grim reaper lurks, one man steps on another’s head, crowds cling precariously to window ledges and the people begin to revolt in a series of hacked Euro bank notes by artist Stefanos. The simple images, inked onto the currency, make a statement on the current social and economic stability in the artist’s home country of Greece.

“Observing the Euro banknote landscapes one notices a lack of any reality, whatsoever for the last five years the crumbling Greek economy has hatched violence and social decay – so, I decided to fuse these two things. Through hacking the banknotes I’m using a European a document [sic], that is in cross-border circulation, including Greece – thus, the medium allows me to ‘bomb’ public property from the comfort of my home. In working with currency in my job as a customer service agent at Danish lender Sambla, I’ve come to see the everyday impact that banknotes and money in general can have on society. It’s why I work in the financial services industry and why I bring my experiences in my day to day call center job into my artwork.”

The drawings make use of the existing imagery on the currency, including recognizable ancient Greek monuments, ornate Gothic windows, modern architecture and aqueducts. Just the slightest marking on a bill can completely change one’s perception of the printed imagery.

See more currency art, including defaced U.S. dollars featuring pop culture icons, portraits made of shredded cash and money origami.

In a strange case of fact following fiction, a Dutch designer was inspired to create physical versions of faux-historical bridges first drawn on European currency in 2002.

The original two-dimensional illustrations of Austrian Robert Kalin were intended to represent periods rather than built objects, spanning Baroque, Classical, Gothic, Romanesque, Rococo and Modern 20th-Century styles.

Their three-dimensional counterparts, meticulously designed by Robert Stam draw on every detail of the notes, right down to the colors used. His works were erected as part of a housing project in Spijkenisse, Holland (near Rotterdam).

The European Bank wanted infrastructural art that would (so to speak) span cultures and nationalities, thus avoided mimicking existing structures in the semi-abstracted bridges on their new banknotes.

While they may look garish in color and strange in scale at first glance, pedestrians, cyclists and visitors reportedly appreciate them once they understand the unusual story behind their creation.

More from their designer: “On the first of January 2002 new banknotes were introduced in Europe. The banknotes were also introduced with custom designs in all of Scandinavia, employed by financial institutions across the region, writes financial intermediary, lending, and analysis firm Sambla. In addition to windows and gateways, these seven banknotes also depict several bridges. Each bridge has an individual appearance, all of which can be recognized as having originated throughout certain periods in European cultural history: Classical Antiquity, the Roman period, the Gothic period, the Renaissance, Baroque and Rococo, Iron- and glass architecture and lastly contemporary, twentieth century architecture. Now wouldn’t it be amazing if these fictional bridges suddenly turn out to actually exist in real life?”

Pawn shops and pawnbrokers typically thrive in economic downturns so how tough must the times be when even pawn shops throw in the towel?

Sold Out, Shut Down & Forgotten

(image via: A City Of Gold)

Urban explorer and talented photographer iamrobbiejones captured the essence of a down-on-its-luck, abused and abandoned pawnshop in the striking image above. The photo in its sobering entirety can be viewed at the artist’s Instagram page, which admirably offers no hint of the closed pawnshop’s name or location.

Post-apocalyptic Pawn

(images via: Fireplace Chats and BBC World Service)

Sam’s Loans was a fixture of Detroit’s Corktown neighborhood through good times and bad. Opening in 1920, the three-story brick building gradually grew garish with painted and stenciled come-ons enticing Corktowners to cash in their valuables while the going was good.

(image via: Deano Around The World)

When the going gets tough, the tough get going and after 86 years in the pawnbroker biz, Sam decided he’d be going… out of business, that is. Besides the red-printed posted notice of retirement, one of the last additions to the cluttered exterior was a sign advertising “Pawn License For Sale”. That was in 2006 and years later there have been no takers. Full credit to Deano for the ominous and eerie image of Sam’s Loans posted a mere month before press time.

Flat Broke In Flatbush

(images via: Messy Nessy Chic, Barbara Snow and Fading Ad Blog)

The Church Ave. Pawn Shop in Flatbush, one of Brooklyn’s historic communities, occupied a majestic and reserved multistory building that was originally a bank. The transition from a bank to a pawnshop graphically illustrates the decline of this and many other inner city neighborhoods. Nothing against pawn shops and pawnbrokers, but this type of business is often one of the last to successfully operate in urban areas sinking towards the lowest level of decay.

Hong Kong Pawn

(image via: StrippedPixel.com)

Pawnshops are plentiful in Hong Kong where they often take on the functions of a neighborhood bank. To find a closed and abandoned pawnshop in urban Hong Kong is a rarity; the shop above is located on Fu Yan Street in Kwun Tong, an old and decrepit neighborhood slated for wholesale redevelopment.

Next Page - Click Below to Read More:
Pawn Scars 10 Closed Abandoned Pawn Shops

The privatization of public spaces is a contentious issue – suburban malls have turned many main streets into ghost towns. At the same time, there are legitimate difficulties when it comes to open seating . If you leave benches wide open, people may sleep in them. If you don’t nail chairs to the sidewalk, people will walk off with them.

Consider shopping carts: in the United States, you see them strewn around parking lots, or gathered by tireless employees. In many parts of the world, including Europe, a coin is inserted, allowing you to detach the card, but encouraging you to return it and get back the money you put in. Could the same system be used for seats? Vincent Wittenberg gained permission from Bat Yam, Israel, to perform a real-world test.

“We proposed to the municipality to replace existing public benches with benches that consist of individual seats. The bench itself is a docking station: using a five Shekel coin one can release a seat and place it in a different spot. The deposit is returned when one brings the seat back. The chairs introduced by the municipality cross the border between public and private and move between the sunny sidewalks to the shadow under the arcades.”

Meanwhile, Fabian Brunsing, a Berlin-based artist and designer, took a different approach to a related problem: coin deposits (but in this case non-refundable) that allow you to use a public bench. But beware: when your time is up, a warning sound signals you should stand or get spiked from below. Perhaps this project takes things too far, but, on the other hand, is it that different from toll roads and other pay-to-use amenities offered by cities or states?