Born and raised in Newfoundland Brenda Rowe-Bartlett is an artist and acclaimed art teacher who has been sharing her vision, energy, and commitment for more than three decades.

During a 30-year teaching career she worked on many fronts to enhance the level of art instruction in Newfoundland and Labrador’s educational system. Highlights of this career include teaching as an art specialist in Bishop’s Falls and St. John’s, and designing and teaching art curriculum programs for both mentally and physically challenged students and high-school students seeking serious art instruction.

Between 1983 and 2005, Rowe-Bartlett served as Department Head of the Visual Arts Program at Bishops College in St. John’s. Her achievements there include creating a high-caliber curriculum that prepared serious art students for university-level fine-arts study, serving on provincial curriculum committees, resurrecting the Teachers’ Art Council of the Newfoundland and Labrador Teachers’ Association (NLTA) and serving on its executive for more than a decade. By partnering with a variety of community networks, she ensured that Bishops College’s art room was the best equipped in the province and that its students could take advantage of an extensive art program that opened their full creative potential. Under her direction Bishops College established (in 1996) its own permanent, juried student art collection. Her students have created both a series of relief prints and paintings for the floating oilrig at Hibernia, and a public exhibition shown at The Rooms in 2005. Her tireless work led her colleagues and students to nominate her for a Prime Minister’s Award for Teaching Excellence; in 1997 she became the first teacher so-honored for the visual arts—one of 12 recipients of the award that year.

In tandem with her teaching career, Brenda Rowe-Bartlett has created a body of work in several media, with an emphasis on clay, textiles, painting and printmaking. Since retiring from teaching in 2005, she has focused on acrylic paint, stoneware clay, and relief printmaking. She has also developed a program of self-exploration through painting that she both uses and teaches as “The Visual Art of Storytelling.” Through the process of exploring ones inner realities with color, shape and line on a blank canvas, many artists and students have peacefully come to terms with very difficult life challenges. Brenda Rowe-Bartlett is now a full time artist in addition to teaching art classes and workshops in her own St. John’s studio. She also presents workshops in curriculum development and painting at other venues across the country. She is a graduate of Memorial University of NL (1973, Comparative Eastern Religions) and studied for her Master’s in Art Education at the Nova Scotia College of Art & Design University. She has worked for the Craft Council of Newfoundland & Labrador’s Gallery, and Red Ochre Gallery, in St. John’s. She has also created her own line of textile sculptures, marketed under the brand names: Yuletide Collectibles Plus and Heritage Collectibles. During the last ten years, Brenda has exhibited and sold her paintings, sculpture and textile figures privately and in the following galleries: The Steele Gallery, the Craft Council Gallery of Newfoundland and Labrador. Her work has been published in the Down Homer, Salt Water Press and the book entitled Cancer and the Art of Healing by Dr. Marilyn Hundleby and Sherry Abbott.

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