Glenna Goodacre

City Safari: The Sweet Revenge Of Glenna Goodacre

Glenna Goodacre at work on her clay model of the monumental "IRISH MEMORIAL." that portrays the toils, hunger and death of the Irish during The Great Famine.

By Thom Nickels• Wed, Apr 29, 2020

The creator of Philadelphia’s Irish Memorial, Glenna Goodacre, died in her home in Santa Fe, New Mexico on April 13, 2020. The cause of death was natural causes. Goodacre, 80, is survived by her husband, attorney C.L. Schmidt and her two children, model Jill Connick (married to singer Harry Connick, Jr.) and a son, Tim Goodacre.

         I had never heard of Goodacre prior to reading her New York Times obituary. I follow the general news of the art world but unless you are an artist or have an added interest in the subject, you are not likely to be familiar with every famous sculptor, painter and watercolorist on the planet. The art world is a crowded metropolis. Art schools graduate thousands of students each year who then go out into the world to "create.” Add to these numbers those people who decide (on a whim) to become an artist, whether talented or not, and you have a metropolis on top of a metropolis. If "Art is anything you want art to be,” then currently there are more artists on the planet than accountants, lawyers, plumbers and hair stylists. 

  

         Goodacre, however, was a ‘real’ artist. She was a prime example of someone who went to art school with the intention of becoming an artist, even if schools cannot teach someone to be an artist just as they cannot teach someone to be a writer.

         Goodacre knew she was an artist even if one of her undergrad teachers at Colorado College in Boulder (Goodacre was born in Lubbock, Texas) gave her a ‘D’ in sculpture. The teacher in question told Goodacre that she had no talent for creating three dimensional figures and that she should forget sculpture. That’s a pretty devastating summation, especially for a young person just starting out in the art world. Goodacre admits that she accepted the professor’s word as dogma, given that there was a time in American education when the opinion of professors carried tremendous weight. How can a professor be wrong? How can someone with an advanced degree be wrong?

         For ten years, Goodacre avoided sculpture, instead concentrating on drawing and painting when she pursued further education in New York. Years later, as a world 

famous sculptor, she returned to Colorado College and told students there about her old professor’s pronouncement while adding the caveat, "Success is the best revenge.” 

         The Denver Post,on occasion of Goodacre’s death, reported that during her ten year hiatus from sculpture a friend handed her a softball-sized ball of wax and suggested she try sculpting again. Goodacre said that the prospect gave her a good scare. Should she defy the infallible professor?  

       

She did defy him and in the end she became one of the world’s most recognized figurative sculptors.  

         "Sculpture,” Goodacre said in one interview, "is still pretty much a man's world. Until recently, you still had men who refused to be in the same show with a woman sculptor. Things have improved for me now that I've made a bit of a name for myself. But I'd still rather be considered - good or bad - for my work, not my gender."  

         A number of critics hated Goodacre’s work, following the negativity,  perhaps, established by that nameless art teacher. Los Angeles Timesart critic Christopher Knight (who in 1993, rightfully decried the 1993 Whitney Biennial Show for its artistic failures), wrote, "I'm not a fan of hers and find her work very sentimental. Her women's memorial is a version of Michelangelo's ‘Pieta' in the Vatican. The symbolism of the woman with the soldier as the slain son resurrected for our sins is detrimental to my understanding of what the Vietnam war was about.   

Glenna Goodacre

         As an image of American involvement in Vietnam, I find it offensive. "An expert is just a guy from out of town,” as Mark Twain once said.   

    

         Goodacre’s Vietnam Women’s Memorialin Washington honored the 11,500 women who served in that war. In the city of Austin, Texas, one can see her piece, Philosopher’s Rock,depicting a small group of elderly men in a discussion circle. Her work, figurative in design, has been described as "informal, languid in repose but vigorous in intellect.” Goodacre’s sculpture won’t attract art nerd praise from avant-garde sources. By way of comparison, her sculptor is about as far away from Louise Nevelson’s monochromatic abstracts as Kansas is from Bangkok.   

         Goodacre’s sculpture of Sacagawea, the Shosone woman who guided Lewis and Clark during their historic expedition—Sacagawea is depicted with her son, Jean Baptiste Charbonneau strapped to her back—is a far more accurate portrayal of the fierce woman (called "the pilot” by the explorers) who could identify plants, roots and berries that were edible or medicinal. Some 19^thcentury novels depicted Sacagawea in far more trivial terms, such as calling her an "Indian princess.” 

         Eager to find out more about Goodacre and her connection with Philadelphia and the Irish Memorial, I contacted Jim Coyne, known as "The Father of the Irish Memorial,” who told me that Goodacre "was a lovely person, a great lady and a highly talented sculptor; she was pleasant and she had a great sense of humor.”

Christopher Knight, LA Times

         The idea for an Irish Memorial in Philadelphia goes back to 1989. Coyne, who was the past president and board member of the Friendly Sons of Saint Patrick at the time, recalls how fellow board member, Dr. Dennis Clark, told him that there was only one memorial to the Irish starvation "in this hemisphere and it’s in Canada.”

  

         Since the anniversary of the Irish starvation was coming up in 1995, Coyne and Clark decided to propose the idea of a memorial to the Friendly Sons. Coyne and Clark’s motto became, "We’ll get something going.” When the idea was presented to the Friendly Sons Board, it was agreed that it sounded like a good idea. Each member was then asked to write a brief description of what they thought the memorial should be. All agreed that it should be about "how the potato crops failed and how the Irish starved.” Coyne said that Board member Jerry Kelly reminded the group that there was much more to the story than that.

         "There was a long history of poor handling of the Irish people,” Coyne said. "They had been under submission of the crown of England for 1,000 years and during that time, the English came in and took all the valuable land and pushed the Irish to where the land was poor. So when the potato crop failed people had only that to develop for food. There was no famine. Ireland was exporting food. People were being starved to death.”

        When The New York Timesreported Goodacre’s death, it made the mistake of calling The Irish Blight or the The Great Hunger (An Gorta Mor), the Irish Famine. 

         "There was no "famine” in Ireland,” Coyne told me after reading The Times obituary "In the period 1845/1850 only one crop failed. The facts reveal that food in quantities sufficient to feed the Irish People was being exported to England while millions of Irish people died of starvation and related diseases. The Irish term "An Gorta Mor”, The Great Hunger is a true description of the period.”

         Most historians agree. 

         In a 2017 article entitled, Capitalism Caused Irish Hunger, Ocean Malandra wrote that,

         "While the blight did strike and take down most of Ireland’s potatoes, the truth is that Ireland was exporting more than enough food to feed everyone at the same time as the famine was happening. Run as a colony of the vast British Empire, Ireland was a colonial food-producing operation, much like India and the sugar islands of the Caribbean, but locals were not allowed to eat the very food they were producing”

         The Great Hunger lasted from 1845 to 1850, the result of a fungus that destroyed 

half the potato crop the first year and then three quarters of the crop for the remaining years. Over a million died and almost 2 million migrated to other parts of the world like Australia and the United States.  

         In Philadelphia, the goal was to have The Great Hunger memorial sculpture in place by 1995.

          "Needless to say we went way beyond that,” Coyne said. "We had a difficult time raising money.” One hundred invitations were sent out to artists to submit design ideas. This was in the early 1990s. Five finalists were selected.

         "Then we had a meeting with prominent Irish people in Philadelphia to evaluate the concepts and select the winner. Glenna Goodacre was the unanimous choice to provide the Memorial. This was in 1996. In 1997 I told Glenna that she had been chosen and in 1998 we signed the contract.”

         Coyne said that Goodacre did extensive groundwork before beginning work on the design. 

         "She went to Ireland to look around and get an idea of the scope of things. She looked at the (replica) ship Jeanie Johnston” [the original having been built in 1847, making 16 ‘migrant’ transatlantic voyages to Quebec and Baltimore, each ocean voyage lasting 47 days]. "She also consulted with marine experts in Mystic Harbor in Connecticut, in San Francisco and New York. She did a lot of preliminary work on her own to make sure what she did was accurate.”

         Coyne recalls how Goodacre, while working on the Memorial, visited Philadelphia on a regular basis. "There was a lot of correspondence back and forth between her organization and ours.” 

         The unveiling of the Memorial took place in October 2002 at a former electric generating station in Chester, Pennsylvania, owned by PECO. Coyne says the place was huge, perfect for such an event. The actual installation and dedication of the work took place the following year in October 2003. 

         In 2013, the Memorial was cleaned and sandblasted but refurbishing sans sandblasting takes place every year. "It gets a protective coating put on it,” Coyne said. 

         The landscaping around the Memorial was engineered to resemble the terrain in Ireland, Coyne said, complete with stone fences. "We have a lady named Pauline Hurley-Kurtz, a professor at Temple University, who handles the landscaping.”

         I asked Coyne if he and Goodacre had kept in touch since the dedication of the Memorial in 2003.

         "We would always send Christmas cards,” he said.