Three men in bronze are arguing at the entrance to Barton Springs Pool, and they are life size, unheroic and mostly undressed. Glenna Goodacre's sculpture was installed under the pecan trees here on the twenty first of November, 1994, commissioned by the Austin nonprofit Capital Area Statues. It shows the folklorist J. Frank Dobie, the naturalist Roy Bedichek and the historian Walter Prescott Webb, three friends who genuinely did spend afternoons at this pool through the 1940s and 1950s talking about Texas. The staging is the point. Dobie and Bedichek sit on the rock in swimming trunks, potbellied, wrinkled and slack muscled, and Webb stands in front of them in a shirt, suspenders and rolled up trousers with his glasses on. It is a monument to three of the most important interpreters of the state that shows them exactly as they would have looked to anyone walking past with a towel. Goodacre was among the best known American sculptors of her generation. She also made the Vietnam Women's Memorial in Washington and designed the face of Sacagawea on the dollar coin, and she died in 2020. Barton Springs itself is a spring fed pool that holds near sixty eight degrees all year, so the swimmers walking past these three are doing exactly what the three of them came here for.
Getting there
30.2638, -97.7707
Locations are approximate and may be inaccurate, on private land, or otherwise inaccessible. Check before you travel.
Hear it from the road
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