Glenna Goodacre - Art

Art

Goodacre's art appears in public, private, municipal and museum collections throughout the U.S. Her bronze sculptures feature lively expression and texture. Goodacre graduated from Monterey High School in Lubbock. She then completed studies at Colorado College and classes at the Art Students League in New York. She became a successful Texas painter, but for the last thirty years she has concentrated mainly on sculpture. She has simultaneously been an active wife, mother, and grandmother.

Goodacre was a lifelong visitor to New Mexico and began residing there in 1983. She and her husband, attorney C.L. "Mike" Schmidt, have homes in Santa Fe and Pecos, New Mexico.

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 (2.4 m) standing portrait of Ronald W. Reagan was unveiled at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California. Another cast is at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage 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 then 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. In 2004, she also designed the Children’s Medal of Honor awarded to then 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, Goodacre's work won the James Earl Fraser Sculpture Award at the Prix De West Exhibition. In 2003, she received the Texas Medal Of Arts and later that year was inducted into the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame in the Fort Worth historic district.

In 1997, Goodacre was inducted into the West Texas Walk of Fame in Lubbock. Eleven years later, Goodacre was named the 2008 "Notable New Mexican". This honor, bestowed by the Albuquerque Art and History Museum’s Foundation, celebrates extraordinary, living New Mexicans who contribute significantly to the public good. A portrait of Goodacre by the artist Daniel Greene is in the permanent collection of the Albuquerque Museum in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

In 2005, the former 8th Avenue in Lubbock was named Glenna Goodacre Boulevard, and in Santa Fe at the State Capitol, then [Governor Bill Richardson presented Goodacre with the New Mexico Governor’s Award For Excellence in the Arts. In 2006, Richardson appointed Goodacre to the State Quarter Design Committee to develop a U.S. quarter coin representing New Mexico.

A retrospective of Goodacre's work was presented on September 25, 2009, at Nedra Matteucci Galleries in Santa Fe.