Joan Witek (b. 1943) has dedicated her artistic career to exploring the complexities, meanings, and endless variations of the color black. Her commitment to abstraction reveals a nuanced language of proportion and meaning. Traditionally seen as the absence of color, black is often associated with severity and death; however, Witek's work navigates these contrasts, presenting black as meditative and expressive. Witek studied at the Art Students League, where her early work was predominantly figurative. During this time, Witek also served as Assistant Curator of primitive art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and until 1978, she engaged in research, publishing, lecturing, and worked on installations focusing on Pre-Columbian and New Guinea art.

Recent solo exhibitions of Witek's work include Museum Wilhelm Morgner, Soest, Germany, Katonah Museum of Art, and Gallerie Weinberger, Copenhagen, Denmark.Her works are included in numerous public collections, such as the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in New York, Arkansas Arts Center, Carnegie Museum of Art in Pennsylvania, Fogg Art Museum at Harvard College, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Yale University Art Gallery, among others.