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Bio
Margot Bittenbender received her BFA at Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio, and her MS in Art Education at Southern Connecticut State University.
After spending twelve years living in Asia and Southeast Asia (including five in Japan), she returned to the U.S. where she resumed studies in Printmaking at both The Ohio State University and, later, at the Columbus College of Art and Design.
While overseas, she served as a docent and lecturer at the National Museum of Bangkok (Thai Buddhist Art and Contemporary Japanese Printmaking). While in Japan and Bangkok, she also was a dealer in contemporary Japanese prints.
She taught elementary art for almost 20 years in Greenwich, Connecticut, winning a Distinguished Teacher Award and also co-directing an interactive writing-music-art-performance program at her school. She also led teachers and students to China twice, and co-directed a one-week intensive English summer camp for elementary Chinese students at a university primary school for 3 summers.
During that time, Bittenbender curated a show of Chinese peasant painters at Art/Place Gallery, at that time located in Southport, CT.
She also studied and then taught Intaglio Printmaking at Silvermine Art Center in New Canaan, CT. where she is now a member of the Artists’ Guild.
Statement
My images tend to be man-made and man-created objects, representations of different cultural histories and ways of thinking. These include a fascination with dolls and puppets, whose mysterious, often unknown, lives are derived from the needs and desires of the human world they inhabit. I have lived in Asia for 12 years, seven of them in Japan, which often creates a cohabitation and jumble of thoughts and ideas in my work. I observe, but don’t comment.
I am addicted to both texture and pattern, both of which figure prominently in my work.