GLENNA GOODACRE (1939-2020)

Harry Connick Jr. shared sad news on social media this evening, saying his mother-in-law, Glenna Goodacre, passed away Monday night.

Glenna Maxey Goodacre was born on August 28, 1939 in Lubbock, Texas. She graduated from Monterey High School. She was a sculptor and designed the Sacagawea dollar, the Vietnam Women's Memorial in Washington, D.C., a bronze of Ronald Reagan that greets visitors as you enter his presidential library and many of her bronze sculptures are featured on the Texas Tech campus.

The City of Lubbock renamed a blvd. after her that runs through the Overton neighborhood across from Texas Tech University.

She is the mother of 1980s supermodel Jill Goodacre who is married to Harry Connick Jr.

Goodacre's father, Homer Glen Maxey was a prominent Lubbock builder, developer and was a part of the Lubbock City Council from 1956 to 1960. He graduated from Texas Tech University in 1931. Sources say he was the first president of the Red Raider Club.

To read the complete article, see:
Glenna Goodacre passes away at the age of 80 (https://www.kcbd.com/2020/04/14/glenna-goodacre-passes-away-age/)

Born in Lubbock, Texas, Goodacre was known mainly for her sculptures. Her work included the Irish Memorial in Philadelphia and the Sacagawea Dollar Coin.

She is survived by her husband, children and five grandchildren.

"She was warm, caring, funny, positive and driven," said her son, Tim. "She loved to encourage and support our adventures in life, especially travel, career and of course, artistic ambition. I was fortunate to be her son."

Vietnam Women's Memorial

To read the complete article, see:
Glenna Goodacre, Renowned Sculptor Who Created Vietnam Women's Memorial, Dead At 80 (https://www.huffpost.com/entry/glenna-goodacre-dead-artist_n_5e96c803c5b65eae709c79b0)

"I just plod along and do what I like to do — which are realistic figures," she told the Los Angeles Times in 1992. She had gone to art school when abstraction dominated, but she said she preferred figurative works and had little interest in pieces that could horrify or disturb. "I like art you can live with," she added.

California Gov. Pete Wilson, Nancy Reagan and Ms. Goodacre in 1998

Her works include a 7-foot-6-inch sculpture of Ronald Reagan unveiled in 1998 at his presidential library in Simi Valley, Calif. — "I must have done the mouth over a hundred times," she said — and a 7-ton monument to the victims of the Irish famine, dedicated in Philadelphia in 2003. Stretching over 30 feet, the Irish Memorial features 35 life-size bronze figures, some starving in Ireland, others voyaging to the United States.

She studied painting and zoology at Colorado College, thinking that she might parlay her skills as an "accurate draftsman of frog guts" into a career as a medical illustrator. But after receiving her bachelor's degree in 1961, she married William Goodacre, a Canadian-born hockey player she met at school, and settled down to raise two children.

They settled in Lubbock, where Ms. Goodacre painted and sketched on the side before recommitting to art and studying at the Art Students League of New York in 1967. She had spent years resisting sculpture — a college professor told her she had no future in the discipline and gave her a D — but back in Texas, one of her friends, gallerist Forrest Fenn, handed her a hunk of wax and encouraged her to sculpt.

He went on to cast Ms. Goodacre's first work in bronze, a six-inch sculpture of her daughter in a ballerina costume that Ms. Goodacre carved with a bobby pin, paring knife and toothpick. (Fenn also became notorious for claiming he buried a cache of gold and jewels in the Rocky Mountains, setting off a treasure hunt that has claimed the lives of at least five people searching in the wilderness.)

While Ms. Goodacre had long cultivated a realistic style, she said she moved "toward less and less detail in sculpture" by the time she developed her proposal for the Vietnam memorial. In an interview for the 2002 book " ‘Let Me Tell You What I've Learned': Texas Wisewomen Speak," she recalled that while working on the sculpture, her chief assistant was focusing on the shoelaces of the boots, much to Ms. Goodacre's chagrin.

"She had them just perfect," Ms. Goodacre recalled. "Every time someone came in to see it, they would say, ‘Gosh it's so real. Just look at those shoelaces.' Well, after they had gone, I'd go mess up the shoelaces. I don't want people to look at the shoelaces. I want them to look at what the piece is trying to say — the feeling of it."

To read the complete article, see:
Glenna Goodacre, artist who sculpted Vietnam Women's Memorial, dies at 80 (https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/glenna-goodacre-artist-who-sculpted-vietnam-womens-memorial-dies-at-80/2020/04/15/38b6cd1a-7f1d-11ea-9040-68981f488eed_story.html)

Two days after her death, members of the community remember the life of Glenna Goodacre, and the impact she made not only in Lubbock, but the world.

To watch the video, see:
Lubbock community remembers Glenna Goodacre (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfqARTJJKlU)

"The Sacagawea dollar does not get the respect it deserves," says Charles, "because to many people it symbolizes another failed dollar coin program. This is unfair. When the Sacagawea dollar debuted in 2000, it heralded the possibility of a new era of American coinage. Goodacre's design was elegant, soft, and Sacagawea's forward gaze recalls that imbued by Leonardo da Vinci on his most famous work, the Mona Lisa. Americans did not spend as many Sacagawea dollars as its advocates had hoped for – but looking at the other two "golden dollar" coin programs that have followed, it's plain to see that our apathy towards the denomination had nothing to do with the Sacagawea coin's design and more to do with our stubborn refusal to phase out the dollar bill."

To read the complete article, see:
Glenna Goodacre, Designer of Sacagawea Dollar Coin: In Memoriam (https://coinweek.com/people-in-the-news/in-memoriam/glenna-goodacre-designer-of-sacagawea-dollar-coin-in-memoriam/)

To read earlier E-Sylum articles, see:
SMITHSONIAN RECEIVES GLENNA GOODACRE'S SACAGAWEA DOLLAR MATERIALS (https://www.coinbooks.org/esylum_v14n18a05.html)
SCULPTOR GLENNA GOODACRE TO RETIRE (https://www.coinbooks.org/esylum_v19n39a20.html)
GLENNA GOODACRE SCULPTURE AUCTION RESULTS (https://www.coinbooks.org/v20/esylum_v20n16a29.html)
ANA MUSEUM ACQUIRES GOODACRE DONATION (https://www.coinbooks.org/v21/esylum_v21n19a10.html)

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