CAMBRIDGE — “Carving Out Time,” a 2020-21 series of five prints by LaToya M. Hobbs now on view at Harvard Art Museums, is a feat: woodblock prints of a scale that, if their two dimensions were three, you could step into them without so much as a stoop. The figures that populate them — Hobbs herself; her husband, the artist Ariston Jacks; and their children — are life-size, and the rooms of her Baltimore home actual scale. At 8 feet tall by 12 feet wide, the works obliterate the sad notion that art can be experienced on a palm-size screen. Scale and texture matter, a fact “Carving Out Time,” if you’ll pardon the pun, puts in high relief.
First, the feat: Woodblock prints are the oldest of the printmaking techniques, and maybe the most demanding; a literal transfer of ink smeared on a carefully incised wood surface, the act of printing itself is the least of its labors. Hobbs carefully inks each of her broad tableaux by hand and runs them through a press in three parts that she assembles into an all-but-seamless whole.
It’s a dizzying endeavor, impressive simply as a triumph of technical will. But the formal demands are counterweighted by a plainspoken sense of the everyday. Hobbs’s subject matter is neither conceptual nor heroic, but the quotidian substance of domestic life, itself a constant battle for balance and harmony. Hobbs’s work depicts a single day in her family life, read left to right: “Morning,” with the bedclothes rumpled by her two small sons as she and Jacks stretch and shake off the night’s sleep; “Homeschool and housework,” folding laundry and guiding lessons on Chromebooks (the prints were made during COVID school closures) amid the chaos of children’s toys.
Tellingly, I think, is the last of the five pieces: “The Studio,” showing Hobbs finally alone; it comes after a print depicting the children’s bedtime. “Carving Out Time” might be a pun on woodblock printmaking itself, but here, the reality of the title settles in: Only after all other needs are met does the artist have time for herself.
Intimate biography is certainly not new in art — pick any big name from Manet and Van Gogh to Bacon and Sherman. But Hobbs offers a closely observed view of the unromantic struggle to do everything in the inevitably messy environs of her family home. It’s at once relatable — who among us hasn’t felt the the scarcity of time for solitary pursuits? — and bluntly declarative: that art and life are inseparable, and any efforts to undo their entanglement is an illusion.
Advertisement
Hobbs’s gaze in “The Studio” is penetrating, even more so if you watch the video the museums made to illustrate her process, which I recommend you do. Watching Hobbs nose-to-nose with herself, scoring the deep lines of her own face — the tracks of effort and exhaustion — requires a level of self-reflection few of us achieve.
But Hobbs zooms out as she zooms in: Throughout the series, in hallways and over the headboard, in the kitchen and stacked deep (of course) in the studio, are namechecks to her lineage as a Black contemporary artist. In “Dinner Time,” I instantly recognized her rendering of Kerry James Marshall’s “Untitled (Club Couple)” hanging over the table, its subjects’ carefree cocktail sipping a stark contrast to Hobbs and Jacks serving the family meal.
Works by artists like Marshall, Elizabeth Catlett, Alma Thomas, and Valerie Maynard adorn their very normal day (the exhibition includes a QR code to help you ID them). They add a sparkle of the extraordinary to the scenes, a prompt to reconsider the mundane toll and circumstance of making art happen, and a declaration that art needn’t be so precious that it exists outside the everyday.
I also thought about the series as a monument to the work of Black artists more broadly, who have had to do that much more for that much longer to gain recognition. “Carving Out Time” as a title quietly celebrates tenacity, determination, will, passed along through generations. The series is a paean to the everyday travails of a many-pronged life lived all at once, especially when there’s no other choice.
Advertisement
LATOYA M. HOBBS: IT’S TIME
Through July 21. Harvard Art Museums, 32 Quincy St., Cambridge. 617-495-9400, www.harvardartmuseums.org
Murray Whyte can be reached at murray.whyte@globe.com. Follow him @TheMurrayWhyte.