Witek studied at the Art Students League, where her early work was representational; around 1969 she began a series of portraits of seated figures. For a time she also served as an assistant curator in the department then called primitive art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, leaving in 1978 to paint full time. In 1976 she took a studio on Duane Street in Lower Manhattan, with Richard Serra among her neighbours, and began working extensively in oil stick, mixing powdered graphite into the medium to vary its reflectivity and texture. She often left an unpainted margin at the edge to loosen the composition.
The Return (1983), in oil stick and graphite on canvas, belongs to the period after 1980 when Witek began stretching her canvases and drew on sources as varied as New Guinea bark painting. William Lieberman acquired her work for the Metropolitan in 1980, and her paintings and drawings entered the Museum of Modern Art, the Albright-Knox, the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Fogg at Harvard and Yale University Art Gallery, among others. Hers is a deliberately narrowed art, its intensity built from limited means.
