Glenna Goodacre: The Sculptor Who Put a Mother on the Money

Glenna Goodacre did not set out to be a sculptor. She was a painter first — portraits, mostly — and she came to clay without formal training in it. What she had was a gift for the human figure, and the patience to teach herself the rest.

She was born Glendell Maxey on August 28, 1939, in Lubbock, Texas, into a prominent local family. She studied art at Colorado College, then went to the Art Students League in New York — the same scrappy, unaccredited New York school where generations of American artists learned their craft from working professionals rather than a syllabus. In 1983 she moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, and built the studio where she would spend the rest of her career.

Over roughly fifty years she made hundreds of works — exact tallies vary, but the body of work runs into the hundreds of figurative bronzes. Her best-known is not a coin at all. It is the Vietnam Women's Memorial, unveiled on the National Mall in Washington in 1993: three women — nurses — tending a wounded soldier. It was chosen from hundreds of submissions, and it filled a real absence. The famous wall a short walk away honored the dead; Goodacre's bronze honored the women who had cared for them. "I have a permanent bronze in Washington, on the Washington Mall," she once said. "That's just huge to me personally, and it means so much to so many people."

Goodacre described herself plainly. "I'm a figurative sculptor and I work in a realistic manner," she said. "I have always been totally absorbed with the figure and the head — the representation of emotion with body language and facial expression."

That is the through-line in everything she made. She was not interested in abstraction or grand symbolism for its own sake. She wanted a viewer to read a feeling off a face or a posture — youth, exhaustion, tenderness, resolve. Her surfaces carry it too: her bronzes have a lively, worked texture, the marks of the hand left visible rather than polished away.

She was elected to the top ranks of her field — an Academician of the National Academy of Design and a Fellow of the National Sculpture Society — and won honors including the Texas Medal of Arts. But she kept a working artist's clear-eyed view of it all. "I really don't care what they say," she said of critics. "I'm happy with what I do and feel fortunate that it sells."

In 1999 the U.S. Mint went looking for a new dollar coin. The Susan B. Anthony dollar had failed in part because people mistook it for a quarter, and Congress wanted a golden-colored coin honoring Sacagawea — the young Shoshone woman who guided the Lewis and Clark Expedition across the West. The Mint invited artists to submit designs. Goodacre's was chosen, and the winning design was unveiled at the White House by First Lady Hillary Clinton in May 1999.

There was one enormous problem with the assignment: nobody knows what Sacagawea looked like. No contemporary portrait of her exists. So Goodacre did what a portrait sculptor does — she found a model. She chose Randy'L He-dow Teton, a young Shoshone-Bannock college student, and worked from her to build a face that felt real rather than generic. She researched period-accurate beaded dress so the clothing would ring true.

Then came the choice that made the coin. Goodacre showed Sacagawea not as a lone heroic figure but as a mother — carrying her infant son, Jean Baptiste, on her back, the baby's face peeking over her shoulder. It was the first time a U.S. coin had centered a mother and child this way. "I wanted people to be moved by her youth, strength and intensity," Goodacre said, "to create what truly means something emotionally to people."

The coin entered circulation in 2000. The obverse — the "heads" side — is hers; you can find her initials, GG, on it. The original reverse (the "tails" side), a soaring eagle, was designed by Mint sculptor Thomas D. Rogers. When the program became the Native American dollar series in 2009, the reverse began changing every year to honor a different Native American contribution to U.S. history — but Goodacre's Sacagawea stayed on the front, where it remains. It is, by sheer volume of coins struck, one of the most widely reproduced portraits of a Native American woman ever made.

The contest came with a $5,000 fee. Goodacre asked to be paid in her own dollar coins — and the Mint obliged, in style.

She received 5,000 of the 2000-P Sacagawea dollars, given a special burnished finish that made them look distinctly different from the coins jingling in everyone else's pockets. They were delivered to her personally by U.S. Mint Director Philip N. Diehl, escorted by Mint Police. Collectors know these today as the Goodacre Presentation coins, and because only 5,000 exist with that finish, they are among the most sought-after pieces of the whole series. The artist, in other words, ended up holding 5,000 small rarities of her own making.