Glenna Maxey Goodacre is best known for rendering sculptures showing the human spirit with a depth of emotion. She is most famous for the Vietnam Women’s Memorial in Washington, D.C. (1993). Glenna also won a competition to create the obverse face of the Sacagawea dollar (2000). Since there was no known image of the famous historical figure, she used Randy L-Teton, a Shoshone-Bannock college student as her model. The dollar is the first three-quarter portrait on a U.S. coin rather than showing her in profile. The view enables Sacagawea to stare at the coin holder. Goodacre also created the Irish Famine Memorial (2003) that includes 35 life-sized figures situated at Penn’s Landing in Philadelphia and an 8-foot sculpture of President Ronald Reagan for his presidential library (1998). She is a fellow of the National Sculpture Society and an academician of the National Academy of Design.

Glenna was born in 1939 in Lubbock, Texas. She attended Colorado College and majored in art. While at CC, she broke her leg while skiing. She never finished the sculpture project for her art class and received a D in the course. "Her professor told her not to try sculpture again, as she had no future in it — and Glenna believed him" for awhile.* She ignored the professor’s advice and later studied at the Art Students League in New York. During her early career, she concentrated on painting but migrated to sculpture in 1969. Her first sculpture was a 7-inch depiction of her daughter complete with ballerina costume. She has created more than 50 public sculptures of many famous figures including President Dwight Eisenhower, Katherine Anne Porter, Dan Blocker, Greer Garson, Scott Joplin, and Barbara Jordan as well as Cecil Green (in the UT Dallas Green Center) and Eugene McDermott (McDermott Library).

She has won many awards including the James Earl Fraser Sculpture Award in 2002 and the Texas Medal of Arts and the New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts in 2003. A street was renamed in her honor in Lubbock, Texas (Glenna Goodacre Boulevard). Her daughter is Jill Goodacre, a former Victoria’s Secret model and wife of actor and musician Harry Connick, Jr.

*From Pierce, Paula. Let Me Tell You What I've Learned. University of Texas Press, 2002, p. 105.

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