Remembering Dr. Charlotte Werner

Dr. Charlotte Werner, artist, author, musician, scholar, and retired studio professor in the School of Art, passed away peacefully on January 29, 2026, at the age of 82. 

Charlotte’s youth was spent in Canora, Saskatchewan, with her parents and brother. She enjoyed her small-town Saskatchewan life. She received her BFA from the School of Art in 1965, an MA in the psychology of perception from North Dakota State University in Fargo in 1969, and an MFA in 1973 from the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks. She taught at the post-secondary level in North Dakota from 1969 to 1974, when she was hired as an Associate Professor at the School of Art. There she taught influential courses in introductory and second-year drawing, using innovative techniques such as slide projections on models. She was one of the first women at the School of Art to be granted tenure, in 1979. Among her many students were Prof. Derek Brueckner, Melanie Rocan, Divya Mehra, and Jacki Traverse. She retired from the School of Art in 2005. 

She was an outstanding printmaker and held one-person exhibitions at Plug In (Information Flow Systems, 1975), and of her large-scale drawings at Gallery 111 (Recent Drawings, 1982). She gave performances of her electronic music and dance in the late 1980s (Schism, Royal Albert Arms, 1986; Eclipse: Tales of the Moon, Gas Station Theatre, 1988) and was awarded multiple Manitoba Arts Council grants for her creative research. Her travels for research and pleasure took her around North America, as well as to England and Central America, where she conducted research for her interdisciplinary PhD (History and Religion), Altered Body Symbolism in Mesoamerica, awarded by the University of Manitoba in April 1998. Around that time, in collaboration with colleagues in the Department of Mathematics, she developed the course Mathematics in Art, which she taught until her retirement and which continues to be taught in the School of Art to this day. 

She was an intellectual whose approach was deeply interdisciplinary, combining interests in art, theory, psychology, science, mathematics, architecture, ecology, and archaeology. This wide-ranging curiosity was reflected in her personal library, portions of which have been donated to the School of Art. Through these materials and generosity, her commitment to connecting art with wider fields of knowledge will continue to support research, exploration, and interdisciplinary thinking for future generations.

Writing about her 1982 exhibition at the School of Art, K. Jack Butler noted:

“The vocabulary that she derives from the imaging systems used in the sciences varies from the microscopic to the macroscopic in scale: single-celled animals photographed through the microscope; cross sections of minerals; the structure of crystals; electronic circuits, computer print-outs of binary number sequences; fossils, and patterns of neural synapses. She compressed these images into intricate patterns that also include aerial views of land formations and architectural fragments.” 

She was a kind and compassionate colleague who welcomed me personally to the School of Art more than anyone else when I was hired there in 1996. Charlotte Werner lived an intensely private life after her retirement from the School of Art, carrying on with her scholarly research, her art, and her music.

_{Prepared by Prof. Oliver Botar with the assistance of Prof. Dale Amundson, Prof. Derek Brueckner, the Executors of the Estate, and the obituary published in the Winnipeg Free Press on February 14, 2026.}