Larger Than Life
Glenna Goodacre, one of America’s most famous sculptors, dies at 80 years old in Santa Fe.
One of the most celebrated sculptors of public monuments in the United States, Glenna Goodacre, died April 13 at her home in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She was 80.
Goodacre was known for the massive Irish Memorial in Philadelphia, the Sacagawea dollar, a monument of Ronald Reagan at the Reagan Presidential Library and the Vietnam Women’s Memorial in Washington, D.C. Her work was also in museums from coast to coast.
Her death was announced by entertainer Harry Connick Jr., husband to the artist’s daughter,
Jill Goodacre Connick. “I lost my mother, hero and best friend today, and my heart is completely broken,” she wrote in an Instagram post. “She was one of the most celebrated artists of all time, and yet she always said that her greatest pieces were her two children. I will miss her love, laughter and humor.”
Daniel Anthony, her longtime manager, had known Goodacre for 40 years, 33 of which were spent working in her studio. “She loved working hard but then having fun, cooking, entertaining, traveling. She was a terrific artist,” he says. “With her knowledge of the face and figure, if we didn’t have a model for a piece, she’d just make it up, sometimes with no photos or anything. One year we were late with a new sculpture for the Prix de West.
I got her set up in the studio with an armature and clay, then went out to run some errands. When I came back, she had made Basket Dancer from her imagination.”
While her work was celebrated widely throughout the country— millions of people owned a version of her work, the Sacagawea dollar, a 2000 commission from the
U.S. Mint for which she was paid $5,000, all in dollar coins—her work resonated with Western art fans who were drawn to her bronze pioneers and Native Americans, including many women subjects. Her work was the subject of a special session of the Scottsdale
Art Auction in 2017, during which her world auction record was set at $409,000 for her monument Puddle Jumpers. Goodacre, who had been in poor health after an injury in 2007, had many of her molds destroyed after the sale.
“With their classic, timeless dignity, Glenna’s Southwestern sculptures seem to fill a void in the history of American art,” Anthony wrote in an essay in the 2009 book Glenna Goodacre Sculpture. “At the turn of the 20th century, among the Taos Society of Artists, and the Cinco Pintores who founded the Santa Fe art colony, there were no sculptors. With a small handful of exceptions, there weren’t any sculptures with Pueblo subjects until Glenna came on the scene in the 1970s.”
Goodacre had long shown her work, including many of those Pueblo subjects, at Nedra Matteucci Galleries in Santa Fe. “Glenna was at the top of the sculpture world and remained always down-to-earth. She was a wonderfully close friend to Richard and I for many years and we loved and enjoyed her cheerfulness,” says gallery owner Nedra Matteucci. “Her friendship and art will always be cherished.”