Glenna Goodacre
1939-2020
Texas-born Goodacre began her artistic endeavors as a painter rather than a sculptor. She graduated from Colorado College and studied at the Art Students League of New York. Eventually, she began to work in three dimensions, shaping portrait busts and figures in wax and clay, transforming herself from painter to sculptor. Central to her career, however, was always an emphasis on the creative challenges of the human figure.
During a remarkable career spanning five decades, Goodacre was awarded many important public commissions, including her Vietnam Women's Memorial in Washington, D.C., and her design for the Sacagawea dollar. In 1997, Goodacre was selected as the winning sculptor in an international competition to create the Irish Memorial at Penn's Landing in Philadelphia. This was Goodacre's most ambitious public sculpture; it comprises 35 life-size figures documenting the potato famine in Ireland and the subsequent immigration of survivors to the United States. In 1998, she created a seven-foot standing portrait of President Ronald Reagan depicted in casual riding attire for the National Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City and Reagan's presidential library in California.
Goodacre was an academician of the National Academy of Design and a fellow of the National Sculpture Society. She won many awards at these institutions' New York exhibitions. Goodacre received honorary doctorates from her alma mater, Colorado College, and Texas Tech University in her hometown of Lubbock. In 2002, she won the James Earl Fraser Sculpture Award at the Prix de West Exhibition. In 2003, she was awarded the Gold Medal For Career Achievement from The Portrait Society of America and the Texas Medal of Arts. She was inducted into the Cowgirl Hall of Fame in 2003.
