1970's

Studying at the Art Students League from 1969-1973, Witek’s early work is largely figurative, in 1972 she makes a series of black and white woodcuts from The Museum of Modern Art’s The Hampton Album which had been exhibited at the museum in 1966. During this period, Witek is also appointed as Assistant Curator in primitive art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Until 1978 she researches, publishes, lectures and works on installations of Pre-Columbian and New Guinea art.

1974 marks a turning point in Witek's practice, painting a large work on four separate canvases (left). The painting is her first to be concerned exclusively with simple geometric form and in building form with rows of parallel lines. She also begins working with black paintstick on unstretched canvas. Awarded the Lowe Foundation Grant in 1973, the ensuing years 1974-76 are her most experimental with the end of this two year period marking her return to the square configuration. Her practice evolves to the incorporation of a range of surface textures, using graphite, to amplify through light refraction the compositional elements. Enquiry into the edge of her paintings by means of unpainted margin space also begins, softening the rigor and tension of the composition and breaking away from the traditional practices of painted surface boundaries.

In the summer of 1978 Witek makes a series of six small pencil and ink drawings in response to the series of large all-black paintings she has been making. Consisting of a grid of thousands of equally spaced minute vertical pen strokes, the formal structure of these works are indicated by means of doubling select lines. Crucial in her artistic development, a structural method evolves which informs her work moving forward, she develops a grammar of repeated pen strokes organized in grid patterns, a highly effective vehicle for expression. Witek begins experiments with translating this technique back into her paintings.

During this decade Witek exhibits in Interior/Exterior at Women’s Interart Center, NY (’73), Queens Artists, ’76 curated by Lowery Sims at the Queens Museum, NY (’76), A Painting Show at P.S. 1, NY (’77), Queens Artists Choose Queens Artist at P.S. 1, NY (’77-8), Women Artists from New York curated by Lawrence Alloway at SUNY, NY (’78) and Ten Downtown, Artists Open Studios, NY (’78). Solo exhibitions include Joan Witek: Squareworks at Lowe Art Gallery, Hofstra University, NY (’74) and Joan Witek at Ames Gallery, NY (’75).