Celebrated artist and sculptor Glenna Goodacre, whose design of young Shoshone woman Sacagawea and her baby Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau (“Pomp”) has appeared on the small “golden” dollar since 2000, has died at the age of 80. Passing away in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on April 13, 2020, Goodacre leaves behind an artistic legacy reaching far and wide.
When she was announced as the designer of the Sacagawea dollar in 1999, Goodacre already had an impressive portfolio to her name. Among her professional achievements is the Vietnam Women’s Memorial, a bronze sculpture that debuted at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., in 1993. She also sculpted the Irish Memorial in Philadelphia, a massive work unveiled in 2003 paying homage to the Irish who suffered the Potato Famine in the mid-19th century and those who arrived from the Emerald Isle in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Goodacre was born on August 28, 1939, in Lubbock, Texas, and graduated from Colorado College. She was married to C.L. Mike Schmidt and had a daughter, Jill Goodacre, who became a popular model in the 1990s and eventually married singer and actor Harry Connick, Jr.
