With Mark Wittig’s creative practice, he is engaged in a social practice that examines the lived experience of formal education. In 2023, Wittig’s creative practice was awarded a Catalyze grant. A program of Mid-America Art Alliance and was generously funded by the Windgate Foundation. In 2022, Wittig project Structures that Transformed Education – 1724 to 1974 was awarded an Artistic Innovations Grant, a program of Mid-America Arts Alliance. This project is generously funded by Mid-America Arts Alliance, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Arkansas Arts Council. The financial support from these organizations supported photographing and building architectural sculptures of schools that played a role in changing education in America. This grant supported his creative practice, a solo exhibition, an artist workshop, and a panel discussion, at the Arkansas Regional Innovation Hub in North Little Rock, Arkansas.
In 2021, his photographic work and writing are part of a collective image/text peer reviewed article Simple, Dark, and Deep: Photographic Theorizations of As-Yet Schools published by the academic journal Postdigital Science and Education. The article invited images and words that broadly interpreted what counts as a school. One of the central questions of the article is: how can people, objects, places, process, and life experience conceivably operate as a school? In 2021, a national group exhibition included his photographic work, 30 Over 50: In Context curated by Arnika Dawkins was shown at The Center for Fine Art Photography in Fort Collins, Colorado. In 2021, Wittig video work was part of the exhibition Language at LoosenArt at Millepiani Exhibition Space in Rome, Italy. In 2020, the exhibition, Art as Message, included his photographic work at the Czong Institute for Contemporary Art in Gimpo, Korea. In 2019, Wittig had an installation in the national exhibition Communities, Collaborations & Collectives at the Milwaukee Institute Art & Design in Wisconsin juried by Jennifer Murray, Executive Director of Filter Photo. The installation contained photographic portraits, 3D printed reliefs and oral history recordings. In 2018, this work was also shown in the exhibition Material + Meaning at the Firehouse Gallery in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, curated by Russell Lord, Freeman Family Curator of Photographs, Prints, and Drawings at the New Orleans Museum of Art. In 2017, a solo exhibition of his photographic installation titled Elements of Learning Disabilities / Differences was exhibited at the Arts & Humanities Council of Tulsa in Oklahoma. In 2015, a solo exhibition of Wittig installation work titled A Two Room School House, a large-scale interactive installation that filled the gallery and invited the audience to draw on twenty-six chalkboards, was exhibited at Living Arts in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
In 2008, Mark Wittig earned a Master of Fine Arts in Photography & Open Media from The University of Tulsa. In 2003, he earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography & Drawing with a Minor in Art History from The University of Tulsa. In 1995, he earned a Bachelor of Architecture with a Minor in Painting from the University of Arkansas. With this diverse education, Wittig have worked as an architect, educator, and artist.