Glenna Goodcare (1939- )
Most Americans are familiar with Glenna Goodacre’s sculptural contribution to the nation through her Vietnam Women’s Memorial installed in 1993 on the Mall in Washington, D.C. Her 1999 design for the Sacagawea dollar contributes greatly to her renown. Goodacre’s incredible range of work has made her enormously popular and very widely recognized.Another prestigious work, “After the Ride,” a seven-foot high statue of President Ronald Reagan, was unveiled in Fall, 1998 at the Reagan Library in Southern California.
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, has always been an emphasis on the creative challenges of the human figure.
Goodacre has been an academician of the National Academy of Design since 1994 and a fellow of the National Sculpture Society since 1981. She has won many awards at these institutions’ New York exhibitions. Goodacre has 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.