All across America in countless public, private, municipal and museum collections, Glenna Goodacre’s bronze sculptures are immediately recognizable for their lively expression and texture, and for their intriguing composition.  After graduation from Colorado College and classes at the Art Student’s League in New York, she became a successful Texas painter, but since 1969 she has concentrated mainly on sculpture.  She has simultaneously been an active wife, mother, and now grandmother.

 

Her most well-known work is the Vietnam Women’s Memorial installed in Washington, D.C. in 1993.  Goodacre was selected in 1997 as sculptor for the monumental Irish Memorial in Philadelphia.  Completed and installed at Penn’s Landing in 2003, the massive bronze is her most ambitious public sculpture – with 35 life-size figures. In 1998, her 8-foot standing portrait of Ronald Reagan was unveiled at the Reagan Library in California. Another cast is at the National Cowboy & Western Museum in Oklahoma City.  After a nationwide competition for a Sacagawea dollar coin design in 1999, Goodacre’s rendering for the face was unveiled at the White House by First Lady Hillary Clinton.  In 2004, her heroic bronze portrait of legendary West Point Coach Colonel Earl “Red” Blaik was dedicated at the National College Football Hall of Fame.  Also in 2004 she designed the Children’s Medal of Honor awarded to First Lady Laura Bush in Dallas by the Greater Texas Community Partners.

 

An academician of the National Academy of Design and a fellow of the National Sculpture Society, Goodacre has won many awards at their exhibitions in New York.  Goodacre has received honorary doctorates from Colorado College, her alma mater, and Texas Tech University in her hometown of Lubbock.  In 2002, her work won the James Earl Fraser Sculpture Award at the Prix de West Exhibition.  In 2003, she was awarded the prestigious Texas Medal of Arts and later that year was inducted into the Cowgirl Hall of Fame in Fort Worth.  In 2005 a street in Lubbock, Texas, was named Glenna Goodacre Boulevard and in Santa Fe at the State Capitol, Bill Richardson awarded her the New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts.  In 2006 she was appointed by Governor Richardson to the State Quarter Design Committee to help design a U.S. quarter coin representing New Mexico. In 2008 Glenna was named Notable New Mexican by the Albuquerque Museum Foundation.  The honor, shared with previous recipients Pete Domenici, Wilson Hurley, and Tony Hillerman, includes a documentary film by PBS affiliate KNME in Albuquerque.  2009 marks her 40^th anniversary as a sculptor.

 

Glenna is a life-long visitor to New Mexico and a resident since 1983.  She and her husband attorney C.L. Mike Schmidt have homes in Santa Fe and Pecos and in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico.

 

(Written By: Daniel Anthony) 

 

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