It's been down for a weeks now, but LaToya M. Hobbs It's Time at Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge was one of our favorite shows of the spring/summer. The featured the woodcut series Carving Out Time, a suite of five monumental and deeply personal prints acquired by the museums in 2022.
LaToya M. Hobbs: It’s Time presents the series Carving Out Time, a life-size suite of woodcuts by Arkansas-born and Baltimore-based artist LaToya M. Hobbs. Unfolding over five scenes, the work depicts one day in Hobbs’s life with her husband, visual artist Ariston Jacks, and their two children. Hobbs shares the labor and intimacy of her private life in these prints, centering the negotiations she brokers daily to balance her manifold responsibilities—as a wife, mother, educator, and artist. The series is also a powerful statement about her influences and self-fashioning as an artist: references to paintings, sculptures, and prints by prominent artists such as Elizabeth Catlett, Alma Thomas, Valerie Maynard, and Kerry James Marshall appear throughout. Carving Out Time (2020–21) is the largest expression within Hobbs’s ongoing Salt of the Earth project, which she characterizes as “the personification of Black women as salt in relation to their role as preservers of family, culture and community.” A contemplation of nuanced concepts of time and labor, the work offers an affecting visual statement that is at once deeply personal and universal.
