Glenna Goodacre Vietnam Women's Memorial celebrated in D.C.

Local artist Glenna Goodacre’s bronze statue, The Vietnam Women’s Memorial, was recently celebrated in a 30th anniversary ceremony on the National Mall during Veterans Day events in Washington, D.C.

Goodacre was honored with spoken comments during the ceremony at the Vietnam Memorial. The sculpture was originally unveiled on Veterans’ Day, Nov. 11, in 1993.

The memorial project was begun in 1983 by retired Army Nursing Corps Captain Diane Carlson Evans to honor over 265,000 women who served during the Vietnam Conflict. Evans had served in Vietnam in the late 1960’s. It took congressional legislation, bills signed by two presidents, and a massive fund-raising effort to realize the final memorial.

The Vietnam Women’s Memorial sculpture was created in her Santa Fe studio on the historic artists’ street Camino Del Monte Sol with the help of her many new veteran friends.

After an August 1993 send-off celebration in Santa Fe, the completed bronze sculpture made a 21-city tour on its way to Washington. The first stop was an event in front of the Texas Tech Museum in Lubbock.

Glenna was very close to her parents Homer G. Maxey and Melba T. Maxey who were 2nd generation Lubbock developers and business owners. They were very supportive of her dream to be an artist. Her father had been a World War II Navy commander of landing craft in the Pacific. In the late 60’s and early 70’s Glenna and her dad followed the confusing conflict and watched helplessly as young Americans were killed or returned home damaged from a terrible war. At that time, she was a wife, businesswoman, mother of two small children, and an artist who created works in her kitchen at night or while the kids were in school. In 1969 she turned from painting to concentrate exclusively on sculpture.

Homer Maxey is the subject of a book “Broke Not Broken” published in 2014 by the Texas Tech University Press that describes his 15-year successful battle against an unlawful foreclosure by a Lubbock bank.

Homer and Melba Maxey were both graduates of Texas Tech University. Glenna graduated from Colorado College. She was later awarded honorary doctorates from Texas Tech and Colorado College.

Glenna’s son Tim, fiance’ Denise, and daughter Jill attended the unveiling in 1993, and soon-to-be son-in-law Harry Connick Jr. sang “America The Beautiful”. Unfortunately, Homer Maxey passed in 1990 and did not live to experience his daughter’s remarkable achievement.

Texas Tech University owns several large-scale Goodacre works including a monumental portrait of Former Governor Preston Smith at the Administration Building, Park Place at Talking Plaza at Human Sciences, CEO at Rawls College of Business, Madonna and Child at the Child Development Research Center, Tug O’ War and Basket Dancers among many others at the Tech Museum. Archival material from her Vietnam Women’s Memorial and several studies are in the collection of the Sam Johnson Vietnam Archive at Texas Tech. Her group of four classical life-size bronze figures is at the Lubbock Memorial Civic enter.

A gallery owner who exhibited her work in the 70’s said, “Not bad for a girl.” She signed her works G. Goodacre to disguise her gender from art collectors. In 1990 Glenna leapt at the chance to do something meaningful for Vietnam veterans and their families. Since the bronze was to have a lot of garden space around it on the National Mall in Washington, she wanted to create a true sculpture in the round. She looked for some unifying element to tie the figures together. In almost every photo from Vietnam, there were sandbags. She said at the time, “It seemed natural for a nurse—in a moment of crisis—to be supported by sandbags as she serves as life support for a wounded soldier….” Then she wanted to infuse the sculpture with movement and emotion absorbed from the remarkable stories she had heard from the veterans or read. The result is the touching bronze tribute experienced by over 5 million visitors annually. When she signed the large clay original sculpture for the memorial on one of the sandbags, she inscribed the work for the first time with her first and last names “Glenna Goodacre”.

Glenna Goodacre was the perfect sculptor for the Vietnam Women’s Memorial. By 1990 when the artist search began for the memorial, the feisty, energetic, prolific sculptor already had a number of public large-scale commissions to her credit. In the years after 1993 when the VWM was unveiled, she went on to complete large-scale bronzes of President Ronald Reagan, West Point Coach Earl “Red” Blaik, many other portrait sculptures, full-size groups of children at play, and the massive Irish Memorial in Philadelphia. In 2000 she created the design for the U. S. Sacagawea Dollar that has been continuously minted every year since. Sadly, after a long illness, she passed in 2020 at age 80 in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she had lived and worked since 1983.

This article originally appeared on Lubbock Avalanche-Journal: Glenna Goodacre Vietnam Women's Memorial celebrated in Washington D.C.